#SELF SACRIFICE AND GRIEVING/MOURNING

[lunar-lair]

youre welcome its the leo fan and the analyst in me

some homosexual holding an umbrella

[inknopewetrust]

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐏𝐡𝐲𝐬𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐋𝐮𝐬𝐭

Summary: When the longevity of sin is threatened by the factions of a feuding family on the brink of war, a choice must be made to protect the secrets of a heart torn in two.

[ser erryk cargyll x targaryen!fem!reader] [wc: 10.7k]

Warnings: minors dni (18+ only), smut, angst, mentions of death/war, themes consistent with show, spoilers for the show (season 3).

quick links: masterlist

There is no duty without sacrifice, nor reward without submission. In a world as cruel as this, you often pondered in wilted daydreams of a world at peace.

As golden springs and chilled autumns once brought virtue and good fortune, the hallowed corridors of Dragonstone in the middle of a long, bleak war brought nothing but a faded memory of the past.

The halls whimpered with the martyrs it kept.

And the phantoms snickered at those in wait and the sacrifices one makes for the duty of their house bears scars on those left in their tormented wake.

Night fell with a deep, dark shadow lingering above. A hand gripping the castle as the maids scrubbed the blood from the chamber floor of the Queen.

He was dead.

And you felt a piece of you die with him.

“Sister,” Rhaenyra spoke but her voice was distant.

In an echo chamber of your mind, the noises funneled around you. A heavy weight of air pressed upon you as your hand picked at the wooden edges of the chair beside the fire.

“Leave us,” the Queen spoke to her guard and Elinda quietly.

The door shut behind her and in careful steps, she could see your eyes trained heavily on the spot now covered in a yellow rug. Toys remained from her young boys which struck the shell of her own heart with a fury.

Death lingered in Rhaenyra’s chambers and there was never a moment to mourn. A war roars on the mainland in her name; people perish in acts of heightened emotions and sacrifice puddles even the strongest of soldiers.

“Sister,” she cleared her throat. “To what—“

“When Harwin died,” your voice was hoarse from a weary day, “did you mourn the man you loved?”

Rhaenyra halted behind the settee. Her hands settled to trace its carvings.

“I beg your pardon?” She inquired.

You were lost in a haze of self destruction. Lost within yourself with a haphazard will to move on. Hours had passed, mere hours, and those on the council that sit around a painted table forget the tragedies that have befallen a great house in a matter of weeks.

You mumbled incoherently and Rhaenyra furrowed her brows. She seldom saw you blink in the light of the fire; the waterline of your eyes pooled with tears. One slipped down the cheek closest to her.

She had watched you absent in your own mind as dirt filled the grave in the early morn. It should not have come as a startle that those feelings remained.

“I fear I do not know what to do with myself,” you whispered. “I-I d-do not know what to do.”

“What for, sister?” Rhaenyra approached as she would her smallest child. “You needn’t do anything at this moment.”

She took a seat on the cushion and reached for your hand. It barely brushed your own before something snapped. A arrow shooting from its bow, breaking your stupor and sending you out of your seat.

You removed yourself from the chair and stepped away from her. Your hands shook as your lip trembled.

The death that grieves in isolation swells. Ribbons of torment become suffocating, choking until awoken with a shake.

“I do not wish to be alone,” you all but wailed. “I’ve been alone for so long, so long…”

“Do you speak of sleep? Or, or marriage?” Rhaenyra drew confused. You had been adamant for years, threatening your life and title to remain a spinster the history books would forget.

The Virgin Princess, she imagined the books may speak of.

You let out a weak, strangled laugh at her. Eyes cutting and red, she felt the tremors of Harwin’s pain bubble inside of her. It made her uncomfortable in her skin.

“I loved him, Rhaenyra.”

For the first time, you saw your sister truly look at you.

And she did not see her elder sister.

She did not see the girl, simply two name days older, who was fond of reading and politics.

She could not see the girl who would beckon Rhaenyra to braid her hair while recalling stories of Old Valyria and the conquests of their ancestors.

She did not see a now grown woman who sought independence; someone who tried to subvert the traditions of a name such as the one you shared.

Rhaenyra saw a widow.

She spoke your name softly and you shook your head at her.

“I loved Erryk. I loved him so.”

Rhaenyra let your confession sit.

“I followed you to Dragonstone,” you spat. “I left the only world I’d ever known to remain in your court because you’re my sister, Rhaenyra. But this place,” your eyes trailed along the vaulted ceilings and the wet stones. “This place has done nothing but bring us suffering.”

“Sister,” Rhaenyra sat forward. “We all make sacrifices—“

“No!” Your voice raised as tears fell consistently. “We are weak, Rhaenyra! This would not have happened if we had been prepared!”

“You speak as though his choice was my fault.”

You let silence fall. Diverting your eyes away from Rhaenyra, she felt a grip on her heart go numb. You believed it to be her fault.

“My grief,” you closed your eyes to darkness. “My grief pokes holes in the agony of my life. It heaves within me for a purpose that is not there and I do not know what to do with myself because of it. He is gone. He’s gone, Rhaenyra. I loved him and he’s gone.”

“Is that why you have never agreed to take a lord husband?”

You nodded your head and sank down on her bed.

“Did you truly love Harwin Strong?” You asked, following it with an awkward chuckle. “I find it to be quite amusable that we two daughters loved men in the cloak.”

Rhaenyra shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “I did.”

“And when he died, did you grieve him as I do Erryk?”

“I did.”

“But you have a memory of him; pieces of him always with you.”

She never spoke aloud the paternity of her sons. Rhaenyra was not daft in knowing people knew, but even to you, her dear sister, she never spoke of it.

Rhaenyra did not shy away from having Harwin keep a long distance between their children. She had seen you and Harwin get along well in the presence of her children and often wondered what the world would be like had she been able to marry him in place of Laenor.

Everyone would have ended up in a much happier place, she believed.

“I do," she whispered against the dead of night. "I do, yes."

"And I will never have that," you stressed. Gaze more frantic than before. You shook your head at the thought. "I never would but I still wanted something to be mine. For me to hold and love and cherish but there is nothing I can do now but sit and ponder the "what ifs." But at war, I am not meant to dwell on them."

"Yet here you are, asking about them anyway."

That dreaded silence fell between you once more. It did not escape her that the lives of innocents were at stake while this war met on the steps of each great house. Her son, Helena's son, good men, and kind women were killed for nothing more than fodder.

It was moot; the tragedy of errors.

“I loved him,” your repeated. “I loved him dearly.”

"Tell me," she tried to offer a tight-lipped smile. "How did it begin?"

"Oh, Rhaenyra," you bemoaned. Sniffing and trying not to focus hard on the spot where he fell on his sword. "I do not-"

"But I would like to hear it," she got up and joined you at your side. Rhaenyra took one of your hands in hers. "I do not wish to hear all the details, however."

You envisioned him in your memory. His eyes, smile. How in the shadows of your chambers he was a different man than he one who served your father, your sister.

He was magnetic and quiet.

Erryk was a lover and a fighter.

You laughed and she smiled. "There was something about men in the cloak..."

"I would have to agree," she said. Her eyes gleamed with a memory of Harwin. She loved him. "Dutiful men indeed."

"It felt so scandalous... but he served me."

"In more ways than one," Rhaenyra blushed and you knocked her shoulder with the back of your hand. She had given birth to five children and still remained a form of pious when broaching the subject.

Your tears still fell but Rhaenyra felt the joy of love bloom.

“I was simply jesting,” she started but you gave her a cutting, mischievous glacé.

"Did you not say you wished not to hear of it? Do you want me to tell you all the details? He was quite good, you know? A very fine fuck indeed."

"Oh Gods!" Rhaenyra laughed loudly and for once, you forgot the pain. "Please, spare me of it!"

“He was b-“

“Please!” She spoke your name in a shriek. “I do not wish to think of you in that way!”

"You truly did not know of it?" You questioned her in a striking bewilderment. You never thought yourself to be shroud in secrecy but surely someone had to have noticed your folly in his presence.

He was your father's, then her own, sworn sword.

"I had my suspicions on occasion," Rhaenyra admitted. "It was Harwin who first spoke of it. I did what I could to protect you. It was not long after the wedding. Harwin said he had crossed paths with him," she smiled sheepishly, "though he was not sure of which twin at the time."

Rhaenyra heard a small intake of breath from you. You squeezed her hand.

"But it happened more than once. The happenstance was too peculiar to not think of it in that way, sister. But Harwin was the one to believe it was Erryk. After a while it became easier to tell them apart and he appeared sure."

"I truly did not think it that hard."

Rhaenyra gave you glance of disbelief yet you had been serious.

"Laenor favored him, as did Harwin. That is why I knew he could be trusted. Not only as a fine Kingsguard but with my sister's heart as well."

"Rhaenyra," you sighed in kindness. A tear from your eyes dropped onto your intertwined hands.

"Harwin spoke of his candor. How devoted he was. Yet he broke an oath for the sake of his honor."

"As we all do."

Rhaenyra hummed and thought of her own indiscretions for the sake of love. How Daemon had taken her to the Silk Streets at the same time you were discovering womanhood with one of the Kingsguards. A peculiar life; one caged and riddled with power.

"I would have married him... had he wished to break his oath," you admitted to her and the sheen in your eyes returned. Kingsguard were only released from their duty in death. "But the Gods had other plans it appears."

"I do not doubt it," she replied in turn. "Do you think father knew of it?"

You shrugged your shoulders in indifference. "I fear the Hightower's may have. Even more so now. It takes much to strike a Dragon so deeply. Surely their motives were amplified when he deserted their cause."

Rhaenyra nodded, looking at the children's toys on the rug. She wanted to find the good in the gloom.

"Tell me of him. Tell me of the Ser Erryk I did not know."

“Rhaenyra…”

“Please,” she nearly begged. “Let us find a happiness. As you spoke there had been nothing but pain. There is a part of you that I do not know of and I wish to know now.”

You were not sure when to begin.

The first time you met? The first time you spoke? Those times were trivial and basic. She did not want to hear of your scandals in detail but you could start at the night where it changed. Where womanhood came to you in a way you were not expecting and the wine settled too deep in your bones.

You should have known it was doomed to fail because on that same night, a man died at Rhaenyra’s wedding feast.

But you were too wrapped up in Erryk’s arms to notice that evil lurked in the Red Keep.

The wedding of Rhaenyra and Laenor was no small affair.

It was said that an entire week was to be planned full of tourney's, feasting, and ending in the penultimate betrothal of your sister to your cousin, Laenor, who had all but been absent for the entirety of both your childhoods.

He knew nothing of her but appeared kind.

As the drums beat and the violins soared in the great hall, the two-to-be-wed danced a traditional Targaryen dance that entranced the scope of the room before the guests who dreamed of dancing on the same floor as the heir to the throne joined them.

You sat at the table as Alicent conversed with her uncle in the corner and Daemon squandered his late wife's relative with the pad of his thumb. You downed your goblet of wine as Gerold Royce backed away in embarrassment and Daemon smirked in victory.

“Do you not feel sorrow for your late lady wife?” You asked Daemon who’s look always reminded you of being hunted.

“We were not fond of each other. So, no, I do not.”

"You are a cunt, Daemon," you cut. Your father made a noise of objection and Lord Hand Lyonel Strong choked on his wine.

Daemon laughed. He spared you a glance before turning it back to where Rhaenyra was dancing.

You knew of her infatuation with your uncle. Her eyes kept darting to the table as if no one would see.

Viserys muttered your name in dissatisfaction.

"Brother," Daemon snickered, "it is fine. The Princess was just expressing her admiration for me."

You scoffed as a squire refilled the goblet to the brim. The wine spilled over and the young man went to make apologies but you brushed him off with the wave of your hand.

The wine was gone faster than it had taken to refill it.

"The ire may lay elsewhere I inquire," Daemon gave a smoldering squint of his eyes. "Tell me, good niece, how it feels to be second in a tourney where you have always been first? Seeing the heir of the throne marry before you?"

"You overstep, Uncle," you cut.

"But I am a cunt, remember?"

You sat back in your seat as the air around you became uncomfortable and suffocating. Alicent returned with a strained greeting to which she received nothing in return from you.

It perturbed you that a girl, years your junior, had become your stepmother.

The squire returned to fill your cup but nearly spilled it over your hand as it covered the top of the goblet.

"Squire," Daemon's playful voice was etched with a sinful glee. "I do not believe the Princess needs any. She needs something a bit more sturdy to lift her spirits." He motioned with his pointer finger up to the sky lewdly. “A good fuck would do you well.”

"Daemon," your father spoke and Alicent looked away in a rose-colored blush.

"All in good fun, Brother," Daemon defended as he said your name in a question. The squire escaped quickly from the table; the music changed in the room and the dancers from noble houses joined at a more jubilant pace.

Lord Lyonel eyed the floor as his son, Harwin, danced with Rhaenyra.

Daemon leaned into Lyonel's personal space with a quiet voice.

"Have you been to the Silk Streets, Princess?"

"Daemon!" Viserys ordered loudly. His voice caught the attention of the Velaryon's at the end of the table. "I will not have such talk at this table on this day! It is my daughter's wedding!"

"Of co–"

"It's alright, Father," you turned to him as the weakened look on his worn face became more present. "I believe the eve has gotten the best of me."

Rising from your seat, Viserys objected and Alicent latched herself to your hand.

You felt an evil burn your skin.

"You mustn't go," she pleaded on your father's behalf. "It has only just begun."

"I assure you tomorrow will be a much better day," you told her and wiggled your arm out of her grasp.

Viserys sighed in defeat. He scoured the room for Ser Criston to escort you to your chambers but you had not allowed him the chance to speak. You turned away and stepped down from the risen floor and towards the exit to the left of the Iron Throne. In his sight, Ser Erryk caught his attention.

He could only tell the difference because his helmet had been removed.

"Ser Erryk!" Viserys barked.

Ser Erryk had been a Kingsguard for near three years with his brother, Ser Arryk, alongside him. They had been nothing short of loyal to Viserys in the time since their joining.

"Your Grace," Erryk stopped before the King as he turned around and pointed to his eldest daughter's escape from the Throne Room.

"The Princess wishes to retire," Erryk turned his head to watch you disappear beyond the archway. "Please escort and stand watch until Ser Thorne can return to his station outside of the quarters.”

"Yes, Your Grace."

Erryk did his duty and followed obediently after you. Daemon remained laughing quietly as the reminders of you were left. Wine on the table, a plate untouched of food grew cold as the night wore thin.

You traced your hand along the stones of the hallways of the Red Keep. Ancient and sturdy, the ancestors who crafted these corridors knew not of the stories they would tell; how much each turn of the stone would witness as the years passed and the shadows became ingrained in its pattern.

The wine you had been drinking began to catch up with you.

It had been not more than three cups and you felt flushed and warm. Still with your senses, you felt angry and jolly at the same time.

Yet the frustrations of your family still lingered heavier. You felt the steam roll from your shoulders, loosening itself into tendrils of anger as the sounds of jubilance became faint and the halls became darker and filled with the candlelight of night.

You continued to walk in slow steps as the weight of tiredness fell upon you.

Sounds of armor approaching caught your ears, nonetheless.

You breached the foyer of the grand staircase and turned to rest against the stones. Hands grasping the corners behind your back, you looked down the golden hallway to the armored guard approaching.

"Ser Erryk," you acknowledged as the light illuminated his features before you.

You felt the danger dissipate from your body.

"Princess," he spoke. His accent was notable among those who rallied between common-folk and high-born in the Crownlands.

In the years he and his brother Arryk had served the crown, your paths have crossed. They both presented a fine and reputable record of loyalty and devotion to the cause.

They were good men. A rarity, in the world as you lived it.

But Erryk had always captured your attention more than his brother had. Taller and more attentive to your sister and yourself, he had always caught your eye. You wasted countless minutes of your life simply looking at the knight in hopes that he would look back.

You had memorized his face in a matter of seconds.

"May I ask why you are following after me in such a haste?"

"Your Grace has asked me to escort you, Princess," he continued his approach without explicit permission.

As he came into a closer view, you took stock of the man. A strong face with determined eyes; lips plump and shoulders square yet fitted by the silver of his armor. He had a mole on the left side of his cheek above his lip.

He was beautiful. You were not sure you had ever seen a man with such refined beauty before he had joined the Kingsguard some three years ago. In the times his eyes caught yours in the midst of the chaos of your house, your opinion did not change.

You felt your heartbeat pulse faster.

There was something alluring about his eyes. So focused and intent on the subject upon whom he was speaking to, the unwavering devotion of his trade ever present beyond the armor he wore.

"I see," you muttered. "And what of Ser Thorne? He sees to be my escort often."

"Occupied, Princess. It is a busy evening for the family."

Erryk used your title in a way the others did not. He held it in such high regard, you felt.

You hummed and turned back toward the direction in which you were headed originally. The stairs loomed in the darkness like a warship approaching its moor. The wine that had settled let a small chuckle escape your lips.

"I do wish there were magic in these walls, Ser Erryk. Then I may simply float into bed and there would be no need to leave the nice party."

Erryk was not sure how to respond. He knew you not to be a silly woman. The eldest of Viserys' daughters had always appeared to him to be attentive and near motherly in the wake of Queen Aemma's death.

In the times he had spoken to you, you never feigned such girlish impulse before. It was new. And it surprised him.

Therefore, Erryk took his own leap of difference.

"Princess," he caught your attention and in the light, he wished he had never taken the oath.

Your eyes gleamed with such delight; pupils blown wide from what he deduced to be the wine of the evening and lips plush and slightly parted. The bodice of your gown fit every curve and plush part of your skin in an entrancing way that sent his mind to the places he neglected to attend to.

He knew of what the men in the Kingsguard did. He listened to the conquests of his brothers, both blood and by sword, while he refined himself to his oath.

But his heart nearly stopped at the sight of you. It had never happened before.

He felt ashamed for feeling such a way. For him to imagine what it would be to feel your skin above and below your skirts, listening to the soft sounds of content as he let his lips draw new patterns on your collarbones.

You were a Princess. He should not have such thoughts.

"If I may speak plainly?" Erryk asked you and you nodded for him to continue. He cleared his throat, shifting on his feet.

"Dragons exist in this world. I do not see why magic could not exist as well. There are whispers of such people amongst the townsfolk. Though, I cannot say their rumors are true.”

The sides of your lips began to quirk up into a smile. "Yes. I suppose you are right about that."

You smiled at him and he could not look away. The sides of your eyes creased in delight in regard to the silliest of items: a childish want to be lifted into bed because your feet were too tired.

It was not often that a naive nature still remained in adults.

"Do you not wish to return to the celebration?" You queried. “I saw even Ser Harold tap his feet at the music.”

"I have a duty to you, Princess. The celebration will not miss me."

Erryk did not miss nor question the way your eyes flicked between his lips and his own eyes. He could not resist the urge to do the same to you.

You wet your lips with your tongue in a small jut. Your top teeth tug the bottom lip in before releasing it gently. Attention falling to the chest of his armor before you blinked in a rapid succession and he felt your body radiate a warm sensation.

You pulled the back of your hand to your cheeks to sense the heat.

“My,” you said breathlessly. “I seem to have let the wine get the best of me.” Sheepishly looking down, your gaze returned to him with doe-like admiration.

He felt the blood rushing. Erryk swallowed his nerves.

“It does happen, Princess.”

Your heart beat rapidly against your ribcage—you felt as though it were going to explode.

His eyes were piercing you. Dim in the light of the hall, you could barely decipher where he was truly looking but you felt the stare. You could have felt it a million miles away.

“Ser Erryk—“

Gustily, he cut you off. “Erryk, Princess. You may call me Erryk in confidence.”

It was your turn to swallow the nerves that built up in your throat. You observed him again and in the way he stood. An arm limp on his side while the other held onto his sword tightly.

There was no fear, nothing helpless within you.

Your curiosity painted what his hands looked like under the white gloves. How strong and handsome they must be to match the face of the man. You wondered how they’d feel pressed against you; holding you in ways no woman should wonder.

The feel of them on your breasts, the way they’d play differently than your own in the dead of night.

You released a staggered breath from your nose and he caught the shake that emitted from your chest.

“Erryk,” you clarified your previous mistake. "Please use my title sparingly, then. I wish to be informal when able."

"Of course," and he tried your name on his lips for the first time.

For the first time, you felt at ease.

"I've never asked, but do you enjoy the Kingsguard? After all that is asked of you, your brother, and those in the cloak?"

"It is a honor," he stopped himself short of using your title. "I cannot envision a life outside of it."

To be one of the seven to protect the family was the most profound honor. Only the finest of knights were bestowed the honor.

"I suppose you do get to sleep in the most grand of castles," you quipped.

"And you? Do you like being the daughter of a King?"

Erryk observed the way you pondered deeply. Even if he spent every waking minute with a family of high stature and of the utmost importance, he would never truly understand the perils that came with great privilege.

"Would it be silly if I said no?"

"No," he shook his head. "There are many who wish to be you, however."

"I do not envy them," your gaze saddened at the prospect.

"What is not to be envious about?"

"Freedom... or the lack-thereof it."

The wine was making you feel all sorts of ways that evening.

"Freedom," he reiterated. "That may be more rewarding than both of our positions, Princess."

You narrowed your eyes at him to which he returned with a sly, small smirk and his own look was playful. Erryk was subverting your expectations beyond a reasonable doubt.

Your heart leapt at the idea that he was dallying with you.

You were both young and engaging in a fools errand.

Down the corridor from which you originally came, footsteps began to heighten. You could barely make out the silhouettes of more guards making rounds.

"I wish to retire to my room, Ser Erryk," you called out loudly enough for those to hear.

In an instant, a wall had gone up between the two of you and the wine was drained from your body. Erryk offered his arm in the way a Lord would as you conquered the steps one by one.

The guards surpassed you by changing their route and following down another corridor as the two of you made it to the middle landing of the grand steps.

"Oh," you feigned in their absence.

"There was nothing improper of our conversation, Princess," Erryk reassured you.

Everything and the Gods were improper for a high-born lady–even one unmarried and passed over as an option of heir.

"I know," you replied, feeling the cold metal of his armor simmer the heat of your palms.

You continued up the stairs with him and did not let go once the journey was complete.

"Do you see me a spinster, Ser Erryk?" You asked him and once more, he found himself a loss for words in your presence. No other high-born lady would give conversation so willingly. Yet you always had in your short meetings together.

“Spinster?”

“I am a few years beyond my sister. I am unwed and untethered. Not ideal for a husband to seek, no matter if my father is the King.”

"I do not believe it appr–"

"I really do not mind," your face concentrated on the passage of doors and miscellaneous objects littering the living quarter hallways. "You are not a stranger."

"Nor am I a friend," he felt the need to clarify.

"Then what are you?"

You stopped in the middle of the hall and turned to look at him. The skirt of the dress twirled and scuffed his hand. His fingers twitched to grab onto it.

"I am a sworn member of the Kingsguard, Princess. I have a duty to your name, to the crown."

"And such forsakes you from being a friend?"

Lust.

"Do you wish me to be your friend?" He asked boldly.

In the same moment, a rumble of thunder roared through the sky. The open courtyard that found itself in the center of the wing of the keep whirled with a ruinous swirl.

You opened your mouth to speak but nothing voiced itself into words.

“I do not believe that would be appropriate.” You completed his previous sentence.

The earthy thunder echoed in the sky.

"What would be appropriate?" Erryk tested the waters.

He sensed the colors of his white cloak becoming sullied by his own greed. He took a step forward as the rain began to spill from the clouds above.

"My young sister is to be married," you cautioned. "Before I am to be and I–"

"I cannot take a wif–"

"No," you shook your head and sighed. "I do not wish to marry."

"Princess."

"I do not want to be the wife of a Lord twice my age. I want to make my own choices."

Erryk saw the determination in your eyes. He and Arryk had the same as they left home and declared themselves to be willing trainees for the Kingsguard. They gave everything to live a life of stewardship.

"The guards spoke of your abstention," Erryk admitted. "How you abdicated your inheritance and now Princess Rhaenyra is heir to the throne."

"I am clear of the understanding that you cannot take a wife, nor bear any children. I do not seek that either."

Erryk breathed in deeply. "What do you ask of me, Princess?"

Your observances were flicks of nervous ticks. The way your gaze was scattered across the hall; shades of gray became wet with rain and the fires that lit the way began to waver.

"I fear I ask something the Gods deny me."

Freedom.

The two of you stared at one another for seconds before you turned away and returned walking in a wade of self-destruction.

As the rain poured heavy, chaos erupted in the Great Hall as it did in the quarters above. Erryk looked to the sky through the pillars of stone to listen for a sign.

The Gods rumbled in fury.

But Gods be damned.

The clang of his armor filled your ears faster than the force of his hand encircling around your bicep and spinning you around without much warning. His other hand grasped the bottom of your jaw, filling the space of your cheek and brought his lips impatiently to your own.

You could not hear the rain when time ceased to move.

Erryk's hand let go of your bicep and wrung an arm around your back to meet the top of your dress' bodice. His fingers gripped the back of it and you could feel the fabric of his gloves itching against your skin.

The giddiness of the anxiety that had formed with you made your hands shake. They found purchase on his chest plate. Erryk's thumb caressed your chin and then exchanged its position to the back of your head.

You broke the kiss in breathlessness before he brought his lips to yours again.

Your body buzzed without thinking.

There was no returning to the therebefore.

Not a year into Rhaenyra's marriage to Laenor did she give birth to her first son, Jacaerys, who appeared more like a common boy than a Targaryen.

In the following years, another boy was born with the same complexion and you questioned it not as she had come to you nine months prior and declared her third pregnancy happily.

It was an unkempt secret.

It was also one that you were fortunate not to share.

Ten years to the date of the wedding, both your and Rhaenyra's lives were inexplicably changed. Your father's condition worsened to where it was a battle to walk from bed to door. Alicent's ascent into her own form of motherhood rivaled Rhaenyra's as you kept your distance the best you could.

Alicent made efforts to get to know you better as an adult but you saw what she was. She was a devil disguised as a saint.

She was younger and tried yet to replace what your mother left vacant inside of you. You ignored her with what snide nature the Gods had granted you as you had gotten older.

It was your solitude that kept you sane as the keep grew louder.

That, and the life you kept in the shadows. Though, your nephews did bring a smile to your face.

"Jace!" You shouted with a laugh as the boy stumbled in the courtyard. His wooden sword went tumbling out of his hands after one strike from his brother, Lucerys.

They were so little and innocent.

"You must hold onto it if you want to be a great knight!"

"I was!" His little voice argued back as he went to pick up the word and Lucerys lifted his fist in victory.

Ser Harwin Strong stood on the sidelines of their small battle circle as you took a seat on the bottom step not far from their escapade. The yard was full of workers and knights, both those of the Kingsguard and City Watch.

"Not strong enough, My Prince," Harwin gave him a stern glare that sent Jace into a rigid stance wanting to prove his worth.

The boy was ten yet he wished to be a knight at that very moment.

"You must listen to your Aunt if you want to be a good knight," Harwin pointed at you to which you shook your head, scoffing at his words. "She has fought many a battle; can swing a sword as furious as an axe!"

Harwin laughed as you rolled your eyes.

You could see why Rhaenyra loved him. Why she would risk her entire being to bear his children in absence of Laenor's.

"You lie!" Lucerys accused him.

Harwin knelt down beside Lucerys. "I jest, My Prince. But you should know," he leaned his face closer to his sons, "your brother has a weakness..."

Harwin's voice went quiet and Jace put his arms up in defeat. You went to stand but as you gathered your skirt in your hand and went to push upwards, a hand was presented to you.

You looked up nearly blinded by the sunlight that peaked through the clouds and was met with Erryk's face.

He too had changed over the years.

His hair long was reminiscent of the Targaryen tradition of not cutting it so long as they remained the winner in battle. A beard now flocked his face in full but his heart remained the same.

"Princess," he mumbled as you took his hand, lifting yourself from the stair.

It had been two days since your last meeting but for both your hearts, the beat had not changed since the first night.

"Ser Erryk," you greeted. Lost in yourself, you neglected to drop his hand. "Thank you."

"I bring news. Princess Rhaenyra has begun her labors," he alerted you. “She has asked for your presence.”

You looked to Harwin and the boys, the prior already staring in your direction, eying Erryk with inspection. You dropped his hand in an instant.

"That is wonderful news," you replied with a kind smile. Erryk scanned your face for a sign of dejection at the admission. You noticed he had been doing that as of late and it irked you.

Harwin approached in heavy, quick steps.

"Ser Erryk," he greeted with a nod. "Are you to train with the boys today? Ser Cris–"

"I would not call this training," you clarified. The boys were but 10 and 6. "Play fighting may be more applicable."

"I came to tell the Princess that Princess Rhaenyra has begun her labors, Ser Harwin."

Erryk watched as Harwin's eyes contorted in a way he knew nothing of. A sliver of hope, joy, he was not sure. But it changed the way he felt inside.

"May the Gods grant the Princess good will," Harwin declared.

"Yes indeed," you added. Harwin glanced between the two of you as Erryk's eye-line focused on Jace and Luke putzing in the dirt.

“The Princes’ are most excited to meet their sibling. They have talked of nothing else for the past few days.”

“Speaking the truth, Ser Harwin,” you chuckled. “I pray it not be another boy for her sake. I do not know if she can handle such behaviors.”

Lucerys began to hit the ground with his stick in hard, deliberate strokes.

"I should distract the Princes then," he spoke lowly. "Thank you, Ser Erryk."

"Lord Commander," Erryk bid Harwin farewell as he walked back to the boys. Jace was occupied hitting the wooden sword on his feet and Lucerys came running towards the two of you.

"Ser Erryk!" The boy called jubilantly. "I took down my brother!"

"Oh?" Erryk responded in kind. "A very fierce battle ensued, I am sure."

"Yes! And I will do it again!" Luke smiled at him and it made your heart grow three sizes. “I wish to be a fine knight as you are, as Ser Harwin is.”

“One day, My Prince.”

"Luke," you looked down at the boy to which he put his small hand in yours. "I think it is time to choose an egg for the babe.”

The small boy's eyes lit up like a holiday. "Do you think so!?"

"I do," you squeezed his tiny fingers. "Go to your brother. Tell Ser Harwin that he must take you and then return you to your chambers once the egg has been collected."

Luke hugged at your leg tightly before running off to his brother with a screech.

"Take me to my sister," you told Erryk. "I must be with her."

"Of course, Princess."

Every corner of the keep was filled with spectators as the news of Rhaenyra's labors filtered through the castle. Erryk walked steadfast on your heels as your pace became more quick with noises of her strain making itself known.

"Gods," you said exasperated by her shouting.

"It will be alright," Erryk reassured quietly.

“I am inclined to say you have never seen a labor.”

“No,” he said quietly as you passed a guard walking in the opposite direction. “I have not had the privilege.”

“Far from a privilege, Erryk. It is gruesome.”

As her labor chambers came closer with your steps, the fewer guards and people were permitted in the hall.

"The Septa's once told us that boys were never easy. I fear this one will be a repeat of before."

"A boy?"

Without thinking, you replied: "the genes are far too strong."

But Erryk knew what you meant because in the corridors behind the walls of the keep, Harwin and Erryk had crossed paths in their escapes on more than one occasion.

He spoke your name and pulled at your arm to come to a stop outside of her chamber door. You could practically feel her pain emitting from the wood.

There were no guards standing watch outside of the door which you knew was the fault of the Queen.

"All will end well. Rhaenyra will see it to be true. Your sister is a hearty woman."

You nodded at him. "I know it to be so."

And you planted a quick kiss on his lips.

"Come find me tonight," you pleaded. "I wish to see you."

"I will do my best, Princess," Erryk glanced down the hall before cupping the back of your head and kissing you tenderly. "I will do my best."

"Oh," you gasped. The breath had been taken from your lungs as your airway cast a shudder. One of your arms around his shoulders, hand snaking itself to cradle the nape of his neck under his hair while the other hand danced along the side of his face and its thumb traced the line of his lower lip as a set of trembling pants melted together to make a seamless one.

Erryk's hands, worn and calloused from a day's work, trailed the sides of your body and traced the curve of your hips to your thighs. His grip wavered between the harshness you had craved for and his gentle mask.

“These days,” he grunted, teeth clenched tightly together as his jaw flexed with concentration, “have been unforgiving, Princess.”

It had taken him five days to find time with you after the birth of Prince Joffrey.

And so much had changed in those five days.

You lifted yourself up in a rhythmic careen as your heart began to pound against your chest. His eyes seldom left your face. Erryk watched for every bated breath and each staggered exhale while his hands helped guide your hips in genteel rolls.

Between your legs, the feel of his cock was slick and hot. Entering in and out, in and out as he helped try to ease the burn of your thighs working toward elation.

Your hand fell from his face down to his arms. A ghostly light dusting to meet his right hand that had been assisting your movements.

Loosely bringing his hand to your mouth, Erryk’s lips parted as you covered all his fingers with your own except the middle, and brought it to your lips. You kissed the pad of his finger gently.

As you kissed his finger, you lifted yourself from his cock to the tip. He waited for the cool air to hit but it never came as you sank back down and opened your mouth with a mewl as he filled you again.

At that moment, you took his middle finger into your mouth and wet it with your tongue.

He could not speak. For his words were lost in the warmth of your cunt and mouth as your tongue swirled around his digit with a wanton pant. Erryk let his head fall to your chest; lips lingering on the skin of your breasts with nipples taught and pert beckoning to him.

Erryk’s other hand loosened from your hip and grasped your left breast. He palmed the skin before squeezing and letting his palm run over the nipple. You sucked on his finger a bit harder at the sensation.

The hairs from his beard scratched your skin in an insatiable pattern. It was familiar in an exact moment where the past was no more and the future was everclear.

You wanted it memorized. You wanted it traced upon your body.

He tilted his head lower to latch onto your nipple before letting go with an audible “pop” against the lewd sounds of the room. It was morning but the whispered breaths of lovers and the sound of their coitus woke with the rising sun.

You released his finger from between your lips and he lifted his head. His eyes met yours and they glimmered with the same refractions of light one gets as the sun peaks between curtains.

His heart was as large as the sea.

“Lay down,” you wet your lips and held his hand no different than before.

Erryk used his free hand to keep you steady as he laid back on the bed. He bent his knees and planted his feet against the duvet to give you leverage.

“As the Princess commands.”

You bit back a smile. The butterflies in your stomach never ceased to exist.

With your hand eclipsed with his own, you guided his now wet finger down to your clit and he needed no further instructions. The pressure of his finger felt like a lightning bolt shooting through thunder. You gasped as your legs quivered in delight.

And then you smiled fully. Erryk smiled in return and Gods, did you feel the world open up before you.

You placed a hand on his chest before leaning down to kiss his lips still quirked upwards in a sheltered grin. The ministrations of your pleasure not stopped at the joy.

Erryk laid back against the ends of the pillows and watched you lift yourself back up, hand grasping his wrist of the hand to your clit, and began to move faster. He could not help but become entranced in the way his cock disappeared in your core. Your tightness aching for him as it became more slick every passing second.

You breathed in deeply. A hitch in your timber sent his eyes back to yours and you rolled your body deeply—feigning coy in the smoked out candlelight. He could not his gaze roaming the way your breasts moved with every bounce.

The sun was rising behind you.

Enchanting or entrancing, he was captivated as always by his royal woman.

With his hand on your hip, he raised it to trace your spine and felt your muscles begin to shake. Bumps on your skin from his touch made him groan.

You faltered and leant forward. Hands now planted beside his face, your eyes met his own and Erryk gave a small nod. He removed his finger from your clit and ran both hands up your back as you laid your weight on him.

He held you tightly and began to move his hips at an aching pace. Your eyes closed as you hummed in content. Erryk let his face fall beside yours, mouth beside your ear.

"Is this alright, my darling?" he barely whispered and you smiled, he could feel it.

"Yes," you gasped. "Yes."

He laid a kiss on your earlobe in response. With your eyes closed, you could feel bursting colors inside of you. You imagined them swirling behind you eyelids in intertwined wisps of reds and pinks. Yellows of happiness adjoined with the blues of bliss.

In the years you laid together, Erryk was not one to speak loudly nor much during those times. He admired you in its absence. Watching and waiting with bated breath of what pleasure would bring you and he to follow.

It was when he held you close that he felt the oaths he sinned against were foolish.

The touch of a woman, the touch of you, brought him a fantasy he'd never thought of chasing.

You inhaled deeply, legs shaking as he worked you to your orgasm with precision. You turned your head to capture his lips with yours; swallowing his groans when you utilized the last bits of your strength to move your hips at his actions.

Crying out as your body jolts, your right hand snaked itself into the hair that fell on the side of his face.

"Gods," you whimpered. There was little more you could do to hang on.

Erryk's low grunts matched his thrusts the faster they came.

He gripped the back of your thigh and brought your leg upwards, changing his angle. Your shoulders tensed at your growing inability to hold on. A string was snapping inside of you, waiting for it all to be enough.

And at once, it became enough.

You tilted your head upwards with a high-pitched gasp; the sound elongating the second he felt your muscles tighten around his dick and loosen a second later with a fury. He continued to thrust through your tremors. The jerking of your body erupting his own orgasm and with three thrusts, his breath became staggered and wanton.

Against his chin, you rested your forehead uncomfortably to gather yourself. A droplet of sweat beaded from your breasts pressed against his chest and to his skin.

As he recovered his own breathing, a hand of his own rubbed careless lines on your back. Erryk could feel the pulse of blood rushing to your center. He took his hand away from your back and brought it to your face to turn it to him.

Your breath was hot against him as he was certain his own was against yours.

"I apologize," his voice had grown ragged. He spoke softly yet you could hear the hoarseness of his throat. "For not fulfilling your request."

"Come find me tonight," you pleaded. "I wish to see you."

"No," you brushed back hairs from his face. "It warrants no apology."

Erryk sighed deeply. You moved a finger to trace the edges of his beard lightly. He looked at you with a furrowed brow. You pressed a finger to the worrying crease.

"What worries you, my love?"

He appeared hesitant to speak freely in that moment. The comfort of guilt had been eating at him as of late. Act that soiled his cloak in sin, he had forsaken his duty to chase what he had denied himself for so long.

It was the evening chatter amongst the Kingsguard as they sat for supper that churned in his stomach.

"I do not worry," he answered. You did not believe him.

"Your face tells different story, Erryk."

"Do you regret this arrangement, Princess?"

You stopped your movements and locked eyes with him. Just as your heartbeat had started to slow, it picked up again at a rapid pace.

"I– " you paused to find your words. "Where might have gotten that impression?"

"No impression," he clarified. "It was simply Princess Rhaenyra's children–"

At the mention of your sister, you lifted your hips and removed him from you with a shallow shudder before rolling to your side and sitting upright in search of your dressing gown.

"I do not wish to speak of my sister while I lay with you," you informed him. It had never been a subject discussed in the decade of knowing one another. "That is the last person I wish to think of."

"I do not mean it in that way."

"Then in what way do you mean?" You gathered the gown from the floor and put it on in rapid movements.

"It is no secret that the King continues to search for a Lord Husband befitting of your status," Erryk spoke as he sat in the bed you shared. "I never imagined–"

"What?" You drew defensive immediately.

Something deeper lingered inside of you. He knew nothing of the matter.

"When I swore the oath of the Kingsguard I did not imagine being the one who stands in the way of the King's desires."

"He does not know, Erryk. I stand in his way. I refuse the proposals."

"Because you love me."

"Yes!" You exclaimed. "I told you that I wished to carve my own life with what little power I do have of it. This," you stuck both hands outward to him, "is that power."

"And if he were to find out, my fate would be far more severe than being exiled to my homelands."

Ser Harwin left yesterday morning at the instruction of the King.

Rhaenyra would not see anyone in her quarters for hours.

You did not question his comment.

"Have you found someone else to warm your bed?" You asked an impossible question. Erryk let the sigh of disbelief pass his lips.

"I would not inflict such pain on you. Do you truly question my devotion? After what I risk to love you?"

A piece of you constricted with the knowledge you held. How this was likely your last morning together for some time and you were leading it to a deep crevice of spite.

"You question my own devotion for what cause?" You countered. "I do not regret this. I will never so long as I live because we chose to do this, together."

Erryk moved off the bed and slipped on his trousers and linen shirt with the ties undone.

"I do not ask out of a want to be removed from my circumstance."

"Then why ask it?"

"Do you never feel guilt? Of allowing me to besmirch your honor–"

"Please," you begged him and sat on the settee that was littered with books of old. "I do not wish to hear it."

You did feel some guilt. Guilt of a secret that had been eating away at you for a day.

The troubles of life had long settled itself within the walls of your chamber. These conversations had been occurring more often as of late and you knew not the cause but had a rousing suspicion that his honor, duty to the crown levied a darkening cloud over his consciousness.

The culpability of a sin unforgettable to his stature buried him. Now having witnessed the removal of the Lord Commander, and Hand of the King, for the consequences of lust weighed like torture.

A dam of large proportions was meant to break in the keep.

The blood of Rhaenyra's childbirth was still being washed from the halls and with it, the stones cracked under pressure.

Erryk picked up the pieces of his armor from the floor and laid them before himself on the bed. Ingrained in his mind, he assembled each piece to the best of his ability before moving toward you as the birds began to chirp outside of your windows.

The cool breeze of autumn filtered in through the curtains.

It was then he saw the wetness of your cheeks. A silent cry had formed in his wake and he had not seen it. He had given no time for care; he feared your needs were not satisfied.

Before he could stumble out words, you coughed out the admission.

"Rhaenyra is leaving for Dragonstone on the morrow."

Oh.

"She asked for my council... to go with her."

Erryk felt a terrible wall grow in front of him.

"I do not wish to leave you."

"Are you to go with her?" He asked.

A part of him knew the impossible task. He and his brother were inseparable. Being twins, perhaps it was expected of him to be close as thieves but the bonds of a sister had tethered two souls closer than even he could ponder.

He would die for his brother, as you would your sister.

"Yes," you cried. A sob escaped your lips and you let your head fall into your hands.

Erryk tossed his armor back onto the bed, kneeling before you and wrapping his arms around you as his heart stung.

"It is not my place to beg you to stay," he admitted. "You must do as your future Queen commands of you." Spoken like a knight.

"What if my leaving is the last that I will see of you?' You questioned. You lifted your head and cupped his face. "I love you, Erryk. I do not regret my actions."

"And I you," and instead of Princess, he said your name soothingly. "I speak in fear. You speak of what little you have, but with what I do have, my body and soul are yours to keep."

"I do not think I can bear being parted for long. I will not take a husband, I will not take another lover," you declared.

You made your sentiments known. He was not going to question it again.

"Nor I," he agreed. "Nor I."

You pulled your lips to his own.

"I wanted to tell you," you wept, “but I could not find you. I wished not for this to be our parting ways. I do not want to you to remember me this way."

"In what way?" He hummed with a strained, sorrowed smile. "You are as beautiful as the day we met. If this is to be our last moments together, my only regret is not holding you longer."

You let out a wet, sad laugh.

"We will find each other again," he reassured you. His blue eyes shining in the golden glow of morning as the sun blessed the skies in a red and pink dream.

"I swear it, by the old Gods and the new."

You rubbed your thumb across his cheek to catch a tear most of the Kingsguard would never admit to falling in the presence of their lovers. You nodded at him.

"I love you," you whispered.

You wouldn't see him for another six years.

The gates of King's Landing were tall and colored in an ugly terracotta.

You peered out the slim slivers the grated windows of the caravan allowed as it trudged the rocky roads along the shoreline of the city. Glimpses of a cooling fall air, the sun was shielding itself behind clouds with every inching second that wheels churned closer to the keep.

"Surely the city cannot have changed that much since our departure, good sister," Daemon's words were shrouded in a snicker. His eyes are always cutting and looking for a battle.

Eyes tearing themselves away from the outside, you looked at Daemon as he studied you.

"It has changed greatly, Uncle," you retorted. "Perhaps if you had spent more time canvasing it during the light of day you would be able to say the same."

Daemon's lips lifted themselves into a sly, cunning smirk as Rhaenyra shook her head.

"Must we bicker as such? Play civil for only a day and then we shall return home. Might we find some excitement beyond the boor?"

When Daemon became Rhaenyra's husband after Laenor passed, you wished your dragon would swallow you whole.

Rhaenyra said you were being dramatic.

"Vaemond is a peddler," you reassured her, taking her hand in yours and peering back outside of the slits. "Your sons have little to fear."

In the years that have passed over Westeros, every soul had been changed by the tenants of the Red Keep and those who watch over them like vultures at a feast. Rhaenyra's ascendance to Viserys' heir should not have been a catalyst for the pain suffered by those in their watch but yet it could not help itself.

Your fingertips ghosted the wooden edges of the carriage as the latches of the gates began to swing outwards and opening themselves up to you once more.

Rhaenyra understood that her sons had nothing to fret regarding their futures. Viserys had turned a blind eye for years and the sentiment would not change so long as he remained on the throne for the years to come.

She squeezed your tender fingers with her own.

Daemon's eyes wandered from the trusted hands of two sisters to his wife's face.

"I do wonder," Daemon cleared his throat and adjusted in his seat. His sheathed sword knocked the golden accents of the interior. "If there is something of worry for you, good sister."

Rhaenyra's face twitched. A challenge, he imagined.

"I've heard that the Queen has been looking to secure a marriage match for her children."

"Daemon, you forget yourself," Rhaenyra spoke. Your eyes were lost in the courtyard that began to form around you.

"She has evaded such for years," Daemon defended. "I know of no other high-born lady, a princess, who is beyond marrying age and still remains relevant. Alicent is playing chess against an enemy that stays hidden on a cliff."

"Why is the concern so pressing?" Rhaenyra questioned, her eyes narrowing as her hand gripped yours tighter.

"You said it yourself, if Vaemond has the will to bring into question Jace and Luc, then the family will fall into a pit before being able to hoist itself up again. A match may not be out of the question to cease the concerns of other houses who question our ability to rule."

"No." Rhaenyra shook her head. "My father-"

"Knows nothing. The green bitch does his bidding. We all know about it."

The wheels of the carriage struck a bump causing the three of you to lean in one direction before falling back. The sounds of Kingsguard and City Watch members clambering for the arrival of such a caravan began to make themselves known.

"Where do you hear such secrets, Daemon?" You tired of hearing your life being planned without your consent. You narrowed your eyes at the blonde man. "I am near twenty years elder of her children. I am far too old to be the wife of–," there was a part of you that could hardly speak it.

And Daemon chuckled at the prospect.

But then again, he was older than both you and Rhaenyra.

It may have been the proper way of great households, but it was one that you detested. You had seen what marriage had done to your sister, your family, and closest friends. So many lost to what they had known for the sake of alliances and duty.

The memories of your trysts lay present in your mind. He was there.

A piece of Rhaenyra and your mother's stubbornness had harbored itself into you for the last sixteen years when womanhood had finally made sense to you.

There had been a glint in Rhaenyra's eyes at one time and you'd be dammed if you let your family take that from you as well.

"Besides," you diverted. "Father has tried many fine men of great houses to force my hand and yet," you lifted a hand void of jewelry besides a golden dragon that slithered up ornately on your pointer finger.

"Trying times call for trying actions."

You needn't respond to Daemon for him to understand the conversation had ceased. Rhaenyra put pressure on your hand once more before removing it and placing her own back on her belly that grew another child of her and Daemon's.

Outside the caravan of black banners and red sigils, the scattered sounds of court disappeared behind walls rattled with the hooves of the steeds. The carriage came to a rough stop and Rhaenyra gave you a stressed smile.

There was no fond greeting for those who escaped to Dragonstone six years ago.

"I sense the welcome is not as it once was," you whispered to her. Her brows furrowed as she had not paid any mind to the sounds and sights beyond her small party. A sinking feeling landed at the pit of your stomach.

The clatter of tools and wooden planks stopped as the caller announced the members to descend the steps.

And as you thought, the welcome was as the keep had become: vacant of the reverence it once had.

Each member of the Targaryen's who had been nothing short of exiled for their own safety waltzed into the pit of a raging green beast with a poor reception on behalf of the crown the heir expected. It spoke plainly of the disagreeable nature floating between two sides.

With a creak, the doors to the Keep's entrance opened and one soul, Lord Caswell, looked ridden with worry which struck a chord within Daemon, Rhaenyra, and yourself. He approached the heir with a solemn face before bowing.

"Welcome home, Princess."

"Lord Caswell," Rhaenyra responded in kind. His eyes bounced between each of you. He hadn't welcomed any of you to the keep in six years time.

It was as though a century had passed in a second.

"The King is anxious for your return," he continued. "He spoke of nothing but for these past two days. As well as to see his grandchildren, so grown and presentable." Lord Caswell nodded at them.

"Take us to him, if you please, Lord Caswell. It has been a weary journey," Rhaenyra began to walk off as he stuttered.

"Surely you would like to rest first, Princess? I will have your things taken to the visiting quarters."

"Visiting quarters?" Rhaenyra questioned, stopping in her tracks. Daemon was on her heels and her eldest son, Jace, halted with the rest of the children beside you.

Your eyes danced around the courtyard in a silly hope to find a pair.

'Of course he would not be there,' you scolded yourself.

You wondered if you had changed since your last meeting. Would he be able to recognize the woman you had become in the desolate castle?

"The Queen has taken residence in your former quarters, Princess."

Rhaenyra paused before speaking with an understanding that while here on the business of securing her son's legacy, her bygone friend has seized more than just your father.

But as you took in the surroundings you envisioned a world differently than the one that presented itself to you now. One of freedom and without greed; no one playing a long game of power and where lives were not seen as pawns, but as people.

Rhaenyra took a deep breath. She held her hand to her stomach and rubbed a thumb across it gently as the overcoat she wore buried the chill with everything she had lost inside. She glanced at you as your eyes looked everywhere but hers and followed as they met every Kingsguard in the court.

She saw the light dim in the slightest.

"Lord Caswell," She spoke clearly, "take us to my father please." 

Seldom would have prepared you for the state your father was in.

Forced with an eternity of pain, Viserys was a shell of himself in the bed he laid. Each minute he suffered in the stillness of the Milk of the Poppy and it guided him only to lead him astray; every swing of an ax, a sword in the courtyard, would bleed the remnants of happiness that lingered in his dusty room.

He barely recognized you as you held his hand.

It struck your soul when he mistook you for your dead mother.

"Aemma," he croaked as though it took all his strength to talk."

Rhaenyra stilled beside you. You put on a brave face.

"No, father," you reminded him of you. "We are all here now."

He repeated your name brokenly.

"Sister," Rhaenyra approached you with her own son, Viserys by name, on her hip.

You had resigned yourself to inspect the dusty model of King's Landing that had once been a prized possession of the man who could not will himself to stand. The disease had overtaken his body to the point of immobility.

Viserys groaned in pain in his bed.

It was a sound you wished not to hear once more.

"Why don't you find your nephews and reintroduce them to the Keep?" She proposed. Her attitude was emitting more positivity than it should.

"I am sure they have already made their way," you took a finger and swiped it through the dust.

"And they could do well with a guide," she pressed.

You sighed, taking a glimpse behind you and surveying your father as he hid behind the curtains of his bed and cooed at Rhaenrya's other son, Aegon.

"He will be alright, sister."

"I do not share the same confidence, Rhaenyra."

She bounced Viserys on her hip. The boy played innocently with her hair without worry of the world evolving around him.

It was turning sour.

"Go to them," Rhaenyra ordered. "I would start at the training ground... you know how my boys are."

You heard the sound of swords before you saw them.

For once Daemon had been right about the Red Keep: it truly hadn’t changed from your time spent away. The same people found themselves completing the same mundane tasks each and every day until the Father called them home.

At the top of the long steps, you took in the sights you had missed.

It smelled of shit and metal. The people were loud and crowding around a scene of two men sparring along the edges of the yard. In your vision, Jace and Luke were fumbling through the materials they reminisced of as young children.

A chunk taken out of the stone, the wooden swords still available to train with.

You leaned against the barrister of brick. Below, just out of sight, two knights sparred in their time away from the king. Their fierceness caught the eyes of the two Targaryen boys who were in awe of the sights around them.

“Look,” Jace put his arm around his brother and pointed to Erryk and Arryk’s valiant efforts.

The eldest was in awe of such gallantry.

“It is just as we remembered, isn’t it?”

Luke watched as everyone stared at them unabashedly.

“They have always been valiant fighters,” Jace continued. “I remember Ser Erryk helping us adjust our stances. We were all but six and ten.”

"That was not Ser Arryk?"

Jace laughed. "Ser Erryk was the one to help you after I pushed you into that pile of horse shit when you were four. He gave the best advice about watching your opponents."

“And what good did that bring you?” Luke jested and received a slap on the head. He caught you monitoring them from above on the landing of the steps.

“It seems motherly is untrusting of us on our own,” he told Jace who clocked you watching before the sounds of metal swords clanging caught your attention.

“She will not object to us,” Jace picked at the swords on the cart. “She let us hit each other with these same sticks when I was not yet ten. I do not think our Aunt minds if we explore our old home.”

“I do not think she cares about us at all,” Luke spoke of you as he watched the two brothers push one another backwards.

They let up with a shake of their hands and if he could tell them apart, he would say Arryk looked up at you and paused.

“Brother,” Arryk called to Erryk as the latter went to reestablish his footing.

“What?” Erryk heaved in a tired breath. “Again, Arryk. We do not have much time.”

“Brother,” Arryk now insisted and pointed his sword upwards to the tops of the steps.

When he turned around, it was as though all life paused around him. Two worlds gone completely still because for the first time in six years, you and Erryk had finally converged to one place. 

It took his breath away.

As always, thank you for reading. Comments and reblogs, as well as likes, are greatly appreciated. I loved that this character has captured our hearts so much. There truly are no small roles.

[nqathan1]

Humans are Space Orcs is still rotating

Humans live in the past (excluding those of us who do the Anxiety, in which case we have explicitly said that that's Not Good).

But picture:

Aliens who live in the speculative future. Imagine how weird it must be for them to find humans, who base our actions off of things that have happened - so much so, in fact, that attachment theory is a thing. The past can fuck us up like no one's business, or it can make us into awesome people. We celebrate the memories of good things that happen, and we grieve and mourn things that make us sad or scared or nostalgic.

An alien species without nostalgia.

Constantly looking forward to the future - still experiencing the present, but focusing on how to make it better instead of reliving the good that it was.

A species without graveyards or obituaries or days of mourning.

A species without birthdays or holidays or anniversaries, without commemorations or in memoriums or stories passed down without a specific point.

Humans are a storytelling race - we talk about things that happened, things that didn't happen, things that might or might not have happened. We write our stories in the past tense, because they are about things that can't be changed. Things that were. Things that are no longer.

What about the species who focus on What Has Not Been Yet?

That one Internet Thing in this genre about the last members of a dying alien species being found and cared for by humans in its last days marveling at how they remember.

Imagine that's the oddity.

Imagine that setting store in the past is not how it usually happens. Other species would find it strange how we get sad at certain times of the year because a person we once knew is no longer in our life. They would see no point in talking about history, except for the tangible value of the lesson it provides - military tactics, or some wisdom or knowledge. They would be confused why we find it necessary to bring things that Are No More into Now.

In a way, what if the galaxy is devoid of Holding On?

What if humans are the ones who preserve it?

What if the What Ifs govern the actions of all other species, and they tell stories of What Could Be?

What if they can't grasp the value we put on keeping old things close because they used to mean something?

Extrapolating a bit, because I like the "The Thing That Makes Us Human Is Love" thing, what if we're just attached to things more? A human on an alien crew getting funny looks because they keep a picture of their dead mother with them to remember her by. Other species just not understanding why we would sacrifice the things we need before the things we love.

The evolutionary order of preservation is self, progeny, connected others, then unconnected others. But humans, depending on which of those categories they have, shunt themselves to the last slot. Aliens who don't understand why humans run toward the crashed, unstable ship to help the survivors even though they know they won't come back.

More to the point, aliens who don't understand humans going to be with others in their final moments, especially if their own death is assured - or even going down with the ship, as it were. I'm attached to the idea of a human running into an actively melting down reactor to save an alien friend, being told to save themselves upon finding rescue impossible, and the alien who urged them to go being told to fuck off and accept the company.

Just something to think about.

[canonkiller]

thinking about king lindworm again from the perspective of the lindworm. to be born something different from your family, to know it deeply, innately; to be cast out or hidden away from the people you were meant to know because of it, because of the shame that you were born something monstrous, a blame that will rest on your shoulders; to demand what you would have been given if you were like them and to have your efforts fail because you are monstrous; having to make yourself vulnerable - equally vulnerable, from an outside perspective, but to open yourself to such great potential for harm, being more fragile than others because of how much it takes to reach vulnerability of the same intimacy - to be seen as something worth loving. the lindworm desires his birthright as the eldest prince, not as a monster; him being the eldest prince does not keep others from only seeing him as something inhuman, something cruel and terrifying.

and I do think in the lindworm tale that there is an expression of this kind of violent grief of self acceptance, a literal shedding of the protective layers of the self until you are presenting your innermost being, raw and bloody, and saying, this is what I have to protect. this is what others do not believe i am. many versions have the shedding and subsequent night with his wife as being painful and visceral; shedding skins too deep, lashed with cloth and the wounds cleaned with milk before they can be held gently. the lindworm rarely expresses a desire to remain vulnerable, wanting instead to keep his shed skin, to return to it when the night is over and they are no longer alone. to be loved as he is in the daylight requires a sacrifice of dignity that he has never been granted the safety, the luxury of; the love does not come for the public self without exposing the private self, and that is something he has been kept from expressing because he is a monster, forced into isolation where none who see him are willing to meet on that intimate and vulnerable ground, because he is not human like they are, does not look human like they do.

with the lindworm specifically, as the story goes, this exposure is a mutual vulnerability. the maiden on her wedding night, instructed to wear extra clothing to coax the lindworm into shed, is baring herself as well, to the extent she would a human lover; there is an angle to be taken here, with her extra layers being an order from others, that these are layers of reservation that have been taught, and in shedding them she is opening her own self to the lindworm rather than believing those teachings, rather than believing the lindworm is a dangerous monster. there is also the angle that this is a risk she would choose to take with others like her, that the lindworm is specific in being something she is requested to be vulnerable with, that the action would not occur otherwise. is there pity in this love? maybe. I think there has to be, somewhere, that or sorrow, a quiet mourning for how much had to be hurt to reach this, how much had to be lost.

king lindworm is not beauty and the beast, where the monster was a human cursed to a different form. the lindworm was born a lindworm, and has never known anything else; when he returns for his birthright as thd eldest son, the privilege of being we'd is given to him, though the human brides he takes see only a monster. I do not think the lindworm is a tale meant to empower the maiden: it is not a story about revenge, or about the cruelty of kings, or about justice. in king lindworm, two people are vulnerable with each other. the maiden does not re-dress herself in false layers; the lindworm does not desire being human, only to be king - as he is, as he has always been, in isolation or in exile for being born the way he was. i think the lindworm is grieving himself.

[xelasrecords]

Once again I forgot that September 29 is this blog's anniversary, so I'm celebrating now woo! Thank you guys for sticking with me and being my friends. This year has been tough and I probably would've hit an even rockier bottom without tumblr and the people I've talked to here. No matter how short the interaction was, it helped. (MAJOR shoutout to @brighteststar707 @juminies and Lola)

When I hit a milestone, I like to look back on what has happened, so I decided to write unserious summaries and commentaries on my fics based on my recollection of them.

MYSTIC MESSENGER

As One So Half - Oh my God my loved ones are dead it's time to kill V and make Jumin mourn so I have an outlet to grieve.

Violent Need - Insane MC to match a controlling Jumin. The most passionate smut I've ever written. The passion is violence not lust.

Locus of Pain - She's so bitter and they're borderline toxic but at least Jihyun has his GE persona!! My possessive awakening, as in it turns out I don't hate possessiveness if it works for both sides.

Secrets and Sacrifices - I couldn't breathe so I suffocated everyone.

The Oasis Is Beautiful From Up Close - I easily forget about the fics I've written, so what I remember in this one is Jumin/MC/Jihyun, jokes, sexy scene almost sex but not, thoughtful conversation, then jokes again. Also my first romantic smut.

The Final Night - My life finally got a bit better so I allowed Jumin and MC to have a fleeting happiness before plunging them into a final battle.

All That Is Lost - Alas, Jumin is the target of my grief again. He's the one I'm killing now.

As Daylight Comes - Jumin and MC wish they could fuck in front of Jihyun but they respect their friendship too much to ruin their breakfast time.

The Love We Live For - Jumin, MC, Jihyun are falling for each other. I looked back on this with nostalgia because I don't think I can perceive love with as much altruism anymore.

Tea! Would You Like Some? - Jumin excessively promotes his tea because he forgets he likes wine after reader enters his house.

Haven Burning - Finally got the guts to write about Jihyun and it was about being codependent to hell. The start of my angsty smut as personal comfort.

Thank You for the Food - My most romcom fic ever. Wrote it as a pick-me-up to my younger self when I had to juggle a lot of things when I was sick and fantasising about Jumin taking care of me. Looooved writing the banter. My fics haven't been this happy since.

Wedge the Knife Under My Skin - Pent-up anger needed to go somewhere and the best course was through cheating on an abusive boyfriend with Jumin. This nourished my suppressed need for revenge. I was also interested in exploring the grey areas of cheating.

Greatest Kindness - I had an obsession with breakup stories that time so I had to give Jumin one.

Wedding Scene - My friend got married so my brain dramatised the whole thing. I was also grappling with guilt about something else so I smashed them together and it turned out to be a post-breakup fic set after Greatest Kindness.

In the Dead of Night, You Bring Me Back Alive - Tipsy thoughtful conversations inspired by my two brain cells debating each other. Might as well get them out. Oh, and the reader dazzles because we shouldn't be damsel-in-distress all the time in Jumin's fics!!

Cold Wrath - Jumin and the reader try to fight healthily. I got triggered writing the fight and reached a revelation™.

The Worth of Gifts - I haven't deleted this purely to show myself how much I've improved. A part of me wants to slam on this, but it was also my entry into fic writing so I'm just gonna be grateful that my past self got covid and was so bored that she entertained the idea of writing fanfics.

THE SSUM

The Great Anguish of Our Separation Means Nothing to Me - I was soooo excited when I saw Harry's potential for HUGE angst! Break them up, as I like to say.

Go, Go, Stay - A moment of relief when I finally understood Harry's inner working.

Lovely Walk - Persistent reader with a douchebag guy whom I would never recommend to pursue IRL, but this is all fun and games so it's aight. Beat this man into a pulp—metaphorically.

[somewhereincairparavel]

I like how Jason's reputation amongst the gods kind of cements his character as a dutiful leader. I know most ppl don't like the fact that he's all goody goody, but it really fits his arc well, and i like reading about it. it's one of the things about Jason that Rick didn't fumble. He was consistent with his character being dutiful and noble till the very end and makes it a point to show that through others perception.

Zeus- Okay he's a horrible dad, but he did initially respect his son (before jason opposed him in front of the gods, that kinda warped his ego) even going as far as to saying that he was proud to have him as a son and stuff. Which was a pretty ooc thing for Zeus to do especially to his sons. Too bad it only lasted for a few seconds before he went back to being bitchy.

Hera- Jason changed her perception of demigods, we know Hera hated all demigods bc half of them are sired by her husband, she wanted to use jason as a pawn to Gaia's defeat. But all those times she treated jason as her champion, she ended up actually caring about him and considered him a son. She mourned and cried about Jason MONTHS after he died, even going as far as to yell at her husband for not caring or grieving about the child that HE sired.

Apollo- self explanatory, Jason stood up for Apollo from the very beginning, and ended up dying for his sake, even when didn't have to do that. Jason made Apollo understand to have empathy for humans ("Remember what it's like to be human") and made Apollo stop being so full of himself with his selfless sacrifice. So apollo is the Olympian who has the most amount of respect for Jason. And made sure that Jason's sacrifice would not be in vain.

Artemis- if you go to the official Riordan wiki fanpage for Artemis, it's mentioned that Percy and Jason were two of the only male demigods that she had immense respect for. She mentally thanked Jason for standing up to Zeus for Apollo. Of course, being Thalia's brother could also give jason browny points aswell lol.

Athena- She seemed to respect Jason's wisdom in blood of Olympus, when he told his dad that it was unwise to punish apollo for Gaia's waking. Well know Athena respects anyone who has shown wisdom. She shot Jason a very approving look. So it's nice that Athena, who is very critical and picky, observed that Jason is a well thought out and insightful individual.

Aphrodite- kind of self explanatory too, she called jason a lovely boy in piper's dream, even alluding that jason needed absolutely no physical improvement in his looks aswell. I know this has nothing to do with Jason's dutifulness but Aphrodite can sense a person's heart and nature, and she immediately thought jason was perfect for her daughter even before they started dating. We know how picky Aphrodite is when it comes to who people date lol

Bacchus/Dionysus- We know that Bacchus had somewhat remembered Jason (calling him John green and all lol) because jason had done services for him (something about a leopard, iforgot lol). And annabeth pointed out that it was a good thing that jason and Bacchus were on fairly good terms. So there's that.

[edelgarfield]

okay actually putting all the CR3 stuff aside to talk about Vax. for the record I haven't seen TLOVM and this is purely concerning Vax in CR1, and will completely spoil the end of the show.

I love Vax. He was always one of my favorites & I love Liam as a player.

He also fucking infuriates me & I think is the perfect example of a "Selfish Sacrificial Hero Archetype." I don't hold Vax fully accountable bc I think this can be partially attributed to Liam's playstyle & how Liam views the game. But I also know IRL Liam was going through a very hard period of his life and not to be parasocial I think some of Vax's behavior absolutely reflects that.

Vax's Achilles heel was his willingness to throw himself on any sword he can find to save the people he loves. Which seems noble on the surface, except he repeatedly puts himself on the chopping block when there is absolutely no need to. One of the most pivotal moments in his arc, the thing that set him up to become the Raven Queen's champion, was a deal that NO ONE ASKED HIM TO MAKE. He literally offers himself in Vex's place when there was no need to do that. When that is an incredibly selfish choice to make.

Imagine if the Raven Queen HAD taken Vax's life in exchange, which was his original intent in the first place. Do you think Vex would have been happy with that? Fuck no. It's this constant prioritization of his friends at the expense of his own life, in DIRECT OPPOSITION to his friends' wishes. Vax is not saving his friends for their benefit, he's saving ("saving”) his friends bc HE can't live without them & I think there's a huge difference between those two. IMO he ultimately Does Not Care that his friends love him & that they'll grieve him if he were to die in their place, he only cares about HIS grief and HIS guilt. It's selfishness masquerading as love.

We don't know what would have happened if Vax hadn't become the Raven Queen's champion bc he never once tried or considered getting out of the shitty deal he made for no reason. Don't get me wrong, I think it's fitting & tragic & it's a story about believing so wholly that you have no future that you make it come true. (again putting all the CR3 stuff aside) And I do think he found some happiness & peace in being her champion, but I also think a lot of the Raven Queen's beliefs confirmed & enabled the self-destructive behavior that Vax exhibited long before she was on his radar.

Personally, I don't know if Vax ever fully believed or committed to living a happy life with Keyleth. Or even if Vax did, I don't think LIAM ever did. I think Vax/Liam were always attached to the idea of dying a tragic heroic death and that's ultimately what led Vax to walking into his own demise at the expense of everyone that loves him. Vex & Keyleth were able to accept his death & live on, but I don't think Vax could have ever done the same & that KILLS me.

I know I'm being harsh. But I watched this happen in real time, over the course of years, hoping & hoping that somehow, some way Vax would get his happy ending, watching my favorite character, Keyleth, mourn their relationship LONG before it ended, seeing what it did to her & everyone else to love someone who was so, so, SO willing to die for them but never once tried living for them. IMO there were a thousand different off-ramps that Vax could have taken to avoid what happened to him & he ignored every single one. And LIVING through that grief & dread & anger completely changed how I view heroes & self-sacrifice & self-destruction.

I adore Vax, he will always be one of my favorites, but part of me will never forgive him for gracefully & peacefully accepting his death loooooong before he died instead of fighting tooth & nail for a life with the people who would suffer if he were gone thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

[abstractppsychopomp]

—on sacrifice and conditioning

"Clones being programmed- nothing controls me!" "Wrecker, it is a logical conclusion that your affinity for destruction would stem from your conditioning." "You take that back!" "I'm merely stating a scientific hypothesis based on factual data." "Oh well I've got a fact for you. I like to blow things up because I like to blow things up!"

Wrecker and Tech, The Bad Batch season 1 episode 1 "Aftermath"

(disclaimer that here I'm talking headcanons, and while it is all based on my personal analysis of canon events, nothing here is 100% canon!)

So.

Reconditioning exists. I first read about it, obviously, on Archive of Our Own, and later researched more for other reasons, to find almost nothing on the topic- one of the most interesting ones regarding the clones, for the simple reason that it is called a reconditioning. To be conditioned again, twice.

What made me really think about this was the fic I wrote, that resolves around Echo's time after Skako Minor, as he deals with grief and loss, and a brief interlude about Dogma and his reconditioning.

So, Wrecker and Tech's conversation is put there before a (n almost) comical situation, them fighting in the cafeteria against the regs, which distracts a bit the watchers from it- and it's a pity, because it's one of the few things The Bad Batch gave to regular clones.

Tech proposes the idea that clones are engineered to be the way that they are, and Wrecker hates the idea, saying that he's his own person and no one made him that way- and it's the most reasonable response, isn't it terrifying to think that you're not a real person but what someone else made you, that what you are, what you feel you feel because someone else wants you to be that way, to feel those things?

They're, of course, both right.

One of the things I liked the least about The Bad Batch was that they gave us a whole show about clones, but defective ones- which is a huge huge deal, and handled "regs" in a really bad way, at least for me.

Not because regs were the "bad guys"- people who are mistreated can mistreat others, I'm not that naive, but they chose to not explore at all the differences between Echo and the others- and I find that the biggest difference is their perception of death.

My whole fic was born because of this- I imagined Echo, after Skako Minor, learning that Fives is dead, that Dogma and Tup and Hardcase are dead, that so many died while he was imprisoned, and the Bad Batch is watching him grieve from the sidelines, knowing nothing about grief.

Yes, they did mourn 99 when he died, but they aren't like other clones, who consider every clone close family and think that dying for them is a duty and honor. They're a tight-knit group, and while they understand sacrifice they're not part of a group of a thousand clones- they're four, they're clones, they have a thing called Plan 99.

Echo has seen thousands die, and is ready to die any day for the Republic, and the Bad Batch in the meanwhile is almost no used at all to the loss of loved ones.

It's enough to compare two sacrifice scenes, Hardcase and Tech, to understand the difference between Echo and the others, and the difference in how the writers perceive regular, ordinary clones and defective, unique clones.

Hardcase sacrifices himself, and Jesse and Fives are clearly sad- but they accept his sacrifice, because it was Hardcase's choice, and they would have done the same. It's a choice made in the moment, but still a sudden thing that they're all ready for- a juxtaposition that for them is the norm.

When Tech dies, they have a plan for just that- self-sacrifice to make the team survive, Plan 99, and they all oppose to that, they all try to stop Tech, they're, not to be mean, way more emotional.

Yes, we spend more time with Tech than with Hardcase, of course his death is written as something way sadder, but we're here to work with what they gave us, so we have two sacrifices.

One accepted in a minute, a name said twice before, a character made to die and make us empathize and suffer for his death, one that left such a deep mark in everyone around it.

Well, it's telling.

In The Clone Wars, we had some arcs dedicated to clones specifically, but most of them were pretty rushed (I have a beef with the way they wrote clones in the animated shows- except Rebels, but Rebels is the My Only Exception the Paramore spoke of), when The Bad Batch was all about clones.

Just not the regular ones.

So we have Echo, and we have the Bad Batch.

Echo, who's more prone to self sacrifice, just like Hardcase and his other brothers, and the Bad Batch, who has a plan made just for that, I repeat.

The Bad Batch received a different treatment from the kaminoans than the regs, which is why they think that regs hate them just because they are what, stronger, more efficient, different?

The so called 'regs' hate them, they do, and they hate them because their defections are called desirable.

(let's not talk about the word 'regs')

If they're clearly called desirable, there are defections that aren't desirable, and what happens to the clones who have them?

Imagine being scared of being different, of sticking out, because it would mean only bad things and danger (for the people who love angst and aren't scared of suffering termination) for them, and then see someone so clearly different and so 'beloved' for it.

Clones are brothers, sisters, siblings, yes, and not only in the way that makes them fluffy and miss each other.

What happens when, let's say, an older sibling sees their younger sister do what they used to do and used to be berated for by their parents, and not suffer any consequences?

In the worst situations, it ends up creating jealousy, hatred, and ruins the relationship as a whole. Or it simply strains it.

This is what they have.

The Bad Batch had a different upbringing, they had a different life, and their chip didn't work.

(Let's not think about Wrecker and Crosshair for a moment, and focus on the others. Hunter and Tech's chips didn't work. Whether it was wanted or not, they didn't. Why? Their defection, again.)

And they're not prone to sacrifice.

That's not the first thing they think about, that's not an easy answer they can give.

Sacrifice is difficult for them.

(less difficult than for a nat-born, more difficult than for a reg)

Now, sacrifice should be difficult for anyone, but it isn't for the clones, who were trained to fight and die for the Republic.

"Live to fight another day" not fight to live another day, because regs have to fight and fight and fight, and sometimes die- die is considered fighting. They were trained to do it, to fight and to die.

And the only reason this could have happened, is conditioning.

There were nat-borns on Kamino, that they met and interacted with, and they studied nat-borns since they had to one day work under them, so they know an alternative to their life, they have the tools to find out that they aren't being treated right. They were conditioned to accept their situation, their life, this life of fighting and dying, because otherwise why would they? Why would CC-8357 choose to die for a Republic who bought him, if he isn't absolutely sure that he is something made to be bought?

so yes.

Does this make Hardcase's sacrifice less important, less genuine? No, it doesn't because conditioning isn't something infinite.

Can we consider it his choice? Yes, I think so, but not a fully rounded one- in the way their choice to fight isn't a real choice, since they had no other options.

Does this make clones less human? Absolutely not, because with every second they spend outside of Kamino they learn and evolve, and this makes any part of their personality ten times more special- imagine being witty, broody, annoying and short-tempered, and imagine being witty, broody, annoying and short-tempered despite having humanity trained out of you.

the clones are so interesting because they should exist in the middle between droid and human, but can't help but be so human that people created enough lore that if someone wants to read on ao3 about them they have to research beforehand! The Clone Wars writers didn't deserve them but we do.

[love-me-a-lotta-whump]

마이 데몬 - My Demon - Whump List - 🇰🇷

Whumpee: 정구원 (Jung Gu Won) played by 송강 (Song Kang)

Synopsis: Do Do Hee is the successor of the Mirae Group. She gets involved with a demon named Jung Gu Won and makes a contract with him. He can live for eternity by making dangerous, but sweet deals with humans who endure hellish lives. But after looking down upon humans for 200 years, he gets involved with Do Do Hee and somehow loses his power. To prevent his own extinction, he must protect Do Do Hee who has taken all of his power. (MDL)

Genre/Tags: Romance, Office, Supernatural, Fantasy, Religious Imagery/Themes, Superpower, (sorta) Period, Enemies to Lovers, Protective BF/Husband, Trauma, Stabbed, Constant/Near-Constant Whump

Watch On: Netflix (Original), DramaCool, KissAsian

⚠️ CAUTION: Mentions of s**cide and a s**cide is shown a couple times, pls pass this one or proceed with caution if this is a difficult topic for you ⚠️

WARNING: THERE ARE SPOILERS BELOW

1.01 : face cut, bleeding ::: attacked (semi comical) ::: saving someone, concerned for someone, drowning

1.02 : upset ::: manhandled, ambushed, hit ::: trying to drown ::: using himself as a shield, back covered in acid

1.03 : wound reveal (acid burns), concern for him ::: fingers burning (semi comical) ::: fingers burning (comical)

1.04 : ambushed, hit across the head, bleeding, fell to his knees, concern for him, saved, healed

1.05 : fought (comical) ::: angry ::: concerned for someone, saving someone, sweating (pushing himself)

1.06 : concerned for someone, saving someone, sweating (pushing himself), neck nearly slashed with a knife, falling

1.07 : stabbed, teary eyed, fell to his knees, coughing up blood

1.08 : stabbed, teary eyed, fell to his knees, coughing up blood ::: heavy breathing, kicked into his back, knife stepped on (pushing it further into his body), groaning, wincing, struggling, heavy breathing, concerned for someone, knife ripped of his chest, crying out in pain ::: heavy breathing, nearly stabbed again, saved, loved one tries helping him, heavily bleeding, passed out ::: concern for him ::: (in an ambulance: semi treated, unconscious, bloody) ::: concern for him ::: pulled out of an ambulance, rolled through the hospital, oxygen mask, concern for him ::: concern for him ::: concern for him, loved ones told he may not survive ::: concern for him, asleep in his hospital room, oxygen mask, wife tries to save him, weak, heavily lidded eyes ::: asleep, looked after ::: asleep, looked after ::: (nightmare: on fire, screaming in pain), woke up breathing heavily, concerned for someone ::: momentary pain, stumbled, concern for him (comedic) ::: concern for him, looked after ::: in pain, looked after ::: traumatic flashback to his nightmare, anxious, froze up ::: concern for him, told loved one about his nightmare ::: in pain, hiding his pain, concern for him ::: in a lot of pain, lowered to his knees

1.09 : fell to his knees, panicked

1.10 : thrown by an explosion, concerned for someone, manhandled, struggling, self sacrifice, concern for him, walking into a burning building ::: walked into a burning building, (traumatic flashbacks: on fire), desperate, scared, debris falling on him ::: weak ::: walking out of the building (after being magically healed)

1.11 : (in a past life: grieving, in a blind rage, fought, covered in blood, slashed his throat with a sword), woke up stressed, anxious, crying ::: angry ::: angry, emotional outburst ::: emotional

1.12 : (traumatic memories triggered: grieving, in a blind rage, fought, covered in blood, slashed his throat with a sword), crying, concern for him, traumatic past reveal, refusing to let her touch him, comforted

1.13 : trauma reveal

1.14 : emotional ::: glowing red eyes

1.15 : angry, glowing red eyes, protecting someone, concern for him, calmed down, held, comforted, concerned for someone, glowing eyes, sacrificing himself, burned/disintegrated, mourned

1.16 : concerned for someone, glowing eyes, sacrificing himself, burned/disintegrated, mourned

———+———

MORE WHUMP LISTS >>> {x}

[himehomu]

Homura did nothing wrong. And I stand by that. Because, she didn't do anything wrong towards anyone nor did she do anything with malicious intent. The only thing she did wrong is entirely in regards to herself. Rather than basing Homura's entire character around an act she made out of love or reduce her character to an evildoer with no morals nor love in her heart like some people still do to this day under the poor facade of “valid criticism,” I'm going to explain what Homura actually did wrong in Rebellion and her what her act of selfishness actually was.

What Homura did wrong was condemn herself to suffering as an immortal deity, the Devil whom acts as a rebellion against God, The Law of Cycles, strict laws of the original universe, which included Madoka Kaname not existing. That is what she did wrong, but not in the black and white, Good-vs-Evil way most people interpret this as. Yes, they are meant to be enemies one day, but because God favors rules and always doing the right thing, whereas the Devil favors her desire to stay in a world where Madoka is happy, where her friends are happy, where they are safe and have a chance at a life. A desire for happiness vs maintaining order of a broken world for the greater good, even if maintaining order means making sacrifices and making hard choices that directly rebel against that desire and yearning for happiness.

But, here is why Homura is wrong in dooming herself to her fate as the Devil. It's very subtle, but seconds before the Flower Field scene, as they are walking, Madoka turns and tells Homura that it really hurts her seeing her in so much pain and not being able to do anything about it. This may seem like a simple thing a friend would say, but remember that Madoka lost her memories as a goddess. And, as a goddess, she was stuck alone in Heaven having to watch life go by, Homura's life go by, and wasn't able to interfere. Think about that for a second. Think about being Madokami.

Think about when she could finally understand just how much Homura did for her, just how much Homura fought for her in all those time loops; the moment she's able to reciprocate her feelings, she fades from existence as the consequence. Wanting so badly to comfort Homura as she bears the psychological burden of being the only person to remember her, to know her, to miss her, to grieve and mourn her. Thinking the only time she’ll ever be able to see let alone talk to Homura again is when she’s essentially dying from all the grief, the pain, the guilt, the sadness of not being able to save her from her fate of being a goddess trapped in isolation. Think about that, then look at what she says here again. Of course it hurts Madoka seeing Homura hurting so badly and feeling powerless to do anything about it. Because that's what she's been doing as The Law of Cycles. Much like how she said she'd never make the decision to become a Goddess in the first place a few seconds later, she says this because this is the real Madoka who loves and cherishes Homura, who hates to see her hurt.

Take that into consideration when looking at what Homura turns herself into at the end of Rebellion, how she's suffering and you can see the exhaustion on her face and in her eyes, how you can see the immortality essentially sucking the humanity out of her to the point where she herself believes she is evil. This was never about Good vs. Evil. This is about Homura hating herself so much not only for being unable to save Madoka, but possibly even for loving her in the first place considering her love is what made her powerful enough to condemn herself to her fate as a Goddess trapped in Heaven with her wish. This is about Madoka hating herself so much to where she only deems herself worthy so long as she's helping others, her self-loathing making her reduce herself to a sacrificial lamb and throwing away her life for the better of everyone else, caring so little for herself and being unable to even fathom that she'd be mourned or grieved if she were to die, thus sacrificing herself over and over, seeing herself as a means to an end if it means freedom for everyone she loves. Madoka has always been there to comfort Homura and protect her since the first timeline. How can she do that if her memories and powers to do so are locked away? She can't. Because Homura doesn't believe she deserves Madoka's love.

Homura doesn't believe she's worth Madoka's sacrifice in becoming a God and Madoka doesn't believe she's worth Homura's sacrifice in becoming the Devil. Madoka cannot understand that she is so so much more than what she can give to other people whilst Homura is the only one that does. Homura can't understand that dooming herself to immortality pains and hurts Madoka because she can't do anything about it thus she can't save her from her suffering like how Homura ceased her suffering. It's a cycle. A snake eating it's own tail. A pumpkin that spins round and round and round. They're both selfish and they're both selfless. Homura is selfish in the sense that she's not taking into consideration how Madoka would feel if she knew how much she were suffering as the Devil for her sake yet she is being selfless because she's only suffering as the Devil for Madoka and her family and their friends to have a happy life. Madoka is selfish in the same sense that she's not taking into consideration just how psychologically damaging it is for Homura to not only have to watch her die over and over again throughout 100 timelines but to then erase herself from existence with Homura being the only one to remember her and she is selfless by of course only sacrificing herself so much because she cares for everyone and all Magical Girls, Homura especially included. They both love each other enough to sacrifice themselves for the other but they both hate themselves so much to where they believe they are undeserving of the other's love hence they keep dooming themselves to suffering in isolation and in turn dooming each other.

[sleeplesslionheart]

The Haunting of Bly Manor as Allegory: Self-Sacrifice, Grief, and Queer Representation

As always, I am extremely late with my fandom infatuations—this time, I’m about three years late getting smitten with Dani and Jamie from The Haunting of Bly Manor.

Because of my lateness, I’ll confess from the start that I’m largely unfamiliar with the fandom’s output: whether fanfiction, interpretations, analyses, discourse, what have you. I’ve dabbled around a bit, but haven’t seen anything near the extent of the discussions that may or may not have happened in the wake of the show’s release, so I apologize if I’m re-treading already well-trod ground or otherwise making observations that’ve already been made. Even so, I’m completely stuck on Dani/Jamie right now and have some thoughts that I want to compose and work through.

This analysis concerns the show’s concluding episode in particular, so please be aware that it contains heavy, detailed spoilers for the ending, as well as the show in its entirety. Additionally, as a major trigger warning: this essay contains explicit references to suicide and suicidal ideation, so please tread cautiously. (These are triggers for me, and I did, in fact, manage to trigger myself while writing this—but this was also very therapeutic to write, so those triggering moments wound up also being some healing opportunities for me. But definitely take care of yourself while reading this, okay?).

After finishing Bly and necessarily being destroyed by the ending, staying up until 2:00 a.m. crying, re-watching scenes on Youtube, so on and so forth, I came away from the show (as others have before me) feeling like its ending functioned fairly well as an allegory for loving and being in a romantic partnership with someone who suffers from severe mental illness, grief, and trauma.

Without going too deeply into my own personal backstory, I want to provide some opening context, which I think will help to show why this interpretation matters to me and how I’m making sense of it.

Like many of Bly’s characters, I’ve experienced catastrophic grief and loss in my own life. A few years ago, my brother died in some horrific circumstances (which you can probably guess at if you read between the lines here), leaving me traumatized and with severe problems with my mental health. When it happened, I was engaged to a man (it was back when I thought I was straight (lol), so I’ve also found Dani’s comphet backstory to be incredibly relatable…but more on this later) who quickly tired of my grieving. Just a few months after my brother’s death, my then-fiancé started saying things like “I wish you’d just go back to normal, the way you were” and “I’ve gotten back on-track and am just waiting for you to get back on-track with me,” apparently without any understanding that my old “normal” was completely gone and was never coming back. He saw my panic attacks as threatening and unreasonable, often resorting to yelling at me to stop instead of trying to comfort me. He complained that he felt like I hadn’t reciprocated the care that he’d provided me in the immediate aftermath of my brother’s loss, and that he needed me to set aside my grief (and “heal from it”) so that he could be the center of my attention. Although this was not the sole cause, all of it laid the groundwork for our eventual breakup. It was as though my trauma and mourning had ruined the innocent happiness of his own life, and he didn’t want to deal with it anymore.

Given this, I was powerfully struck by the ways that Jamie handles Dani’s trauma: accepting and supporting her, never shaming her or diminishing her pain.

Early in the show—in their first true interaction with one another, in fact—Jamie finds Dani in the throes of a panic attack. She responds to this with no judgment; instead, she validates Dani’s experiences. To put Dani at ease, she first jokes about her own “endless well of deep, inconsolable tears,” before then offering more serious words of encouragement about how well Dani is dealing with the circumstances at Bly. Later, when Dani confesses to seeing apparitions of Peter and Edmund, Jamie doesn’t pathologize this, doubt it, or demean it, but accepts it with a sincere question about whether Dani’s ex-fiancé is with them at that moment—followed by another effort to comfort Dani with some joking (this time, a light-hearted threat at Edmund to back off) and more affirmations of Dani’s strength in the face of it all.

All of this isn’t to say, however, that Dani’s grief-driven behaviors don’t also hurt Jamie (or, more generally, that grieving folks don’t also do things that hurt their loved ones). When Dani recoils from their first kiss because of another guilt-inspired vision of Eddie, Jamie is clearly hurt and disappointed; still, Jamie doesn’t hold this against Dani, as she instead tries to take responsibility for it herself. A week later, though, Jamie strongly indicates that she needed that time to be alone in the aftermath and that she is wary that Dani’s pattern of withdrawing from her every time they start to get closer will continue to happen. Nonetheless, it’s important to note that this contributes to Dani’s recognition that she’s been allowing her guilt about Eddie’s death to become all-consuming, preventing her from acting on her own desires to be with Jamie. That recognition, in turn, leads Dani to decide to move through her grief and beyond her guilt. Once she’s alone later in the evening after that first kiss, Dani casts Eddie’s glasses into the bonfire’s lingering embers; she faces off with his specter for a final time, and after burning away his shadow, her visions of him finally cease. When she and Jamie reunite during their 6:00 a.m. terrible coffee visit, Dani acknowledges that the way that she and Jamie left things was “wrong,” and she actively tries to take steps to “do something right” by inviting Jamie out for a drink at the village pub…which, of course, just so happens to be right below Jamie’s flat. (Victoria Pedretti’s expressions in that scene are so good).

Before we continue, though, let’s pause here a moment to consider some crucial factors in all of this. First, there is a significant difference between “moving through one’s grief” and simply discarding it…or being pressured by someone else to discard it. Second, there is also a significant difference between “moving through one’s grief” and allowing one’s grief to become all-consuming. Keep these distinctions in mind as we go on.

Ultimately, the resolution of the show’s core supernatural conflict involves Dani inviting Viola’s ghost to inhabit her, which Viola accepts. This frees the other spirits who have been caught in Bly Manor’s “gravity well,” even as it dooms Dani to eventually be overtaken by Viola and her rage. Jamie, however, offers to stay with Dani while she waits for this “beast in the jungle” to claim her. The show’s final episode shows the two of them going on to forge a life together, opening a flower shop in a cute town in Vermont, enjoying years of domestic bliss, and later getting married (in what capacities they can—more on this soon), all while remaining acutely aware of the inevitability of Dani’s demise.

The allegorical potentials of this concluding narrative scenario are fairly flexible. It is possible, for instance, to interpret Dani’s “beast in the jungle” as chronic (and/or terminal) illness—in particular, there’re some harrowing readings that we could do in relation to degenerative neurological diseases associated with aging (e.g. dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, progressive supranuclear palsy, etc.), especially if we put the final episode into conversation with the show’s earlier subplot about the death of Owen’s mother, its recurring themes of memory loss as a form of death (or, even, as something worse than death), and Jamie’s resonant remarks that she would rather be “put out of her misery” than let herself be “worn away a little bit every day.” For the purposes of this analysis, though, I’m primarily concerned with interpreting Viola’s lurking presence in Dani’s psyche as a stand-in for severe grief, trauma, and mental illness. …Because, even as we may “move through” grief and trauma, and even as we may work to heal from them, they never just go away completely—they’re always lurking around, waiting to resurface. (In fact, the final minutes of the last episode feature a conversation between older Jamie and Flora about contending with this inevitable recurrence of grief). Therapy can give us tools to negotiate and live with them, of course; but that doesn’t mean that they’re not still present in our lives. The tools that therapy provides are meant to help us manage those inevitable resurfacings in healthy ways. But they are not meant to return us to some pre-grief or pre-trauma state of “normality” or to make them magically dissipate into the ether, never to return. And, even with plenty of therapy and with healthy coping mechanisms, we can still experience significant mental health issues in the wake of catastrophic grief, loss, and trauma; therapy doesn’t totally preclude that possibility.

In light of my own experiences with personal tragedy, crumbling mental health, and the dissolution of a romantic partnership with someone who couldn’t accept the presence of grief in my life, I was immediately enamored with the ways that Jamie approaches the enduring aftereffects of Dani’s trauma during the show’s final episode. Jamie never once pressures Dani to just be “normal.” She never once issues any judgment about what Dani is experiencing. At those times when Dani’s grief and trauma do resurface—when the beast in the jungle catches up with her—Jamie is there to console her, often with the strategies that have always worked in their relationship: gentle, playful ribbing and words of affirmation. There are instances in which Dani doesn’t emote joyfulness during events that we might otherwise expect her to—consider, for instance, how somber Dani appears in the proposal scene, in contrast to Jamie’s smiles and laughter. (In the year after my brother’s death, my ex-fiancé and his family would observe that I seemed gloomy in situations that they thought should be fun and exciting. “Then why aren’t you smiling?” they’d ask, even when I tried to assure them that I was having a good time, but just couldn’t completely feel that or express it in the ways that I might’ve in the past). Dani even comments on an inability to feel that is all too reminiscent of the blunting of emotions that can happen in the wake of acute trauma: “It’s like I see you in front of me and I feel you touching me, and every day we’re living our lives, and I’m aware of that. But it’s like I don’t feel it all the way.” But throughout all of this (and in contrast to my own experiences with my ex), Jamie attempts to ground Dani without ever invalidating what she’s experiencing. When Dani tells her that she can’t feel, Jamie assures her, “If you can’t feel anything, then I’ll feel everything for the both of us.”

A few days after I finished the show for the first time, I gushed to a friend about how taken I was with the whole thing. Jamie was just so…not what I had experienced in my own life. I loved witnessing a representation of such a supportive and understanding partner, especially within the context of a sapphic romance. After breaking up with my own ex-fiancé, I’ve since come to terms with my sexuality and am still processing through the roles that compulsory heterosexuality and internalized homophobia have played in my life; so Dani and Jamie’s relationship has been incredibly meaningful for me to see for so, so many reasons.

“I’m glad you found the show so relatable,” my friend told me. “But,” she cautioned, “don’t lose sight of what Dani does in that relationship.” Then, she pointed out something that I hadn’t considered at all. Although Jamie may model the possibilities of a supportive partnership, Dani’s tragic death espouses a very different and very troubling perspective: the poisonous belief that I’m inevitably going to hurt my partner with my grief and trauma, so I need to leave them before I can inflict that harm on them.

Indeed, this is a deeply engrained belief that I hold about myself. While I harbor a great deal of anger at my ex-fiancé for how he treated me, there’s also still a part of me that sincerely believes that I nearly ruined his and his family’s lives by bringing such immense devastation and darkness into it. On my bad days (which are many), I have strong convictions about this in relation to my future romantic prospects as well. How could anyone ever want to be with me? I wonder. And even if someone eventually does try to be with me, all I’ll do is ruin her life with all my trauma and sadness. I shouldn’t even want to be with anyone, because I don’t want to hurt someone else. I don’t want someone else to deal with what I’ve had to deal with. I even think about this, too, with my friends. Since my brother’s death and my breakup, I’ve gone through even more trauma, pain, grief, and loss, such that now I continue to struggle enormously with issues like anhedonia, emotional fragility, and social anxiety. I worry, consequently, that I’m just a burden on my friends. That I’m too hard to be around. That being around me, with all of my pain and perpetual misfortune, just causes my friends pain, too. That they’re better off not having to deal with me at all. I could spare them all, I think, by just letting them go, by not bothering them anymore.

I suspect that this is why I didn’t notice any issues with Dani’s behavior at the end of Bly Manor at first. Well…that and the fact that the reality of the show’s conclusion is immensely triggering for me. Probably, my attention just kind of slid past the truth of it in favor of indulging in the catharsis of a sad gay romance.

But after my friend observed this issue, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I realized, then, that I hadn’t extended the allegory out to its necessary conclusion…which is that Dani has, in effect, committed suicide in order to—or so she believes, at least—protect Jamie from her. This is the case regardless of whether we keep Viola’s ghost in the mix as an actual, tangible, existing threat within the show’s diegesis or as a figurative symbol of the ways that other forces can “haunt” us to the point of our own self-destruction. If the former, then Dani’s suicide (or the more gentle and elusive description that I’ve seen: her act of “giving herself to the lake”) is to prevent Viola’s ghost from ever harming Jamie. But if the latter, if we continue doing the work of allegorical readings, then it’s possible to interpret Bly’s conclusion as the tragedy of Dani ultimately succumbing to her mental illness and suicidal ideation.

The problems with this allegory’s import really start cropping up, however, when we consider the ways that the show valorizes Dani’s actions as an expression of ultimate, self-sacrificing love—a valorization that Bly accomplishes, in particular, through its sustained contrasting of love and possession.

The Implications of Idealizing Self-Sacrifice as True Love

During a pivotal conversation in one of the show’s early episodes, Dani and Jamie discuss the “wrong kind of love” that existed between Rebecca Jessel and Peter Quint. Jamie remarks on how she “understands why so many people mix up love and possession,” thereby characterizing Rebecca and Peter’s romance as a matter of possession—as well as hinting, perhaps, that Jamie herself has had experiences with this in her own past. After considering for a moment, Dani agrees: “People do, don’t they? Mix up love and possession. […] I don’t think that should be possible. I mean, they’re opposites, really, love and ownership.” We can already tell from this scene that Dani and Jamie are, themselves, heading towards a burgeoning romance—and that this contrast between love and possession (and their self-awareness of it) is going to become a defining feature of that romance.

Indeed, the show takes great pains to emphasize the genuine love that exists between Dani and Jamie against the damaging drive for possession enacted by characters like Peter (who consistently manipulates Rebecca and kills her to keep her ghost with him) and Viola (who has killed numerous people and trapped their souls at Bly over the centuries in a long since forgotten effort to reclaim her life with her husband and daughter from Perdita, her murderously jealous sister). These contrasts take multiple forms and emerge from multiple angles, all to establish that Dani and Jamie’s love is uniquely safe, caring, healing, mutually supportive, and built on a foundation of prevailing concern for the other’s wellbeing. Some of these contrasts are subtle and understated. Consider, for instance, how Hannah observes that Rebecca looks like she hasn’t slept in days because of the turmoil of her entanglements with Peter, whereas Jamie’s narration describes how Dani gets the best sleep of her life during the first night that she and Jamie spend together. Note, too, the editing work in Episode 6 that fades in and out between the memories of the destructive ramifications of Henry and Charlotte’s affair and the scenes of tender progression in Dani and Jamie’s romance. Other contrasts, though, are far more overt. Of course, one of the most blatant examples (and most pertinent to this analysis) is the very fact that the ghosts of Viola, Peter, and Rebecca are striving to reclaim the people they love and the lives that they’ve lost by literally possessing the bodies and existences of the living.

The role of consent is an important factor in these ghostly possessions and serves as a further contrast with Dani and Jamie’s relationship. Peter and Rebecca frequently possess Miles and Flora without their consent—at times, even, when the children explicitly tell them to stop or, at the very least, to provide them with warnings beforehand. While inhabiting the children, Peter and Rebecca go on to harm them and put them at risk (e.g. Peter smokes cigarettes while in Miles’s body; Rebecca leaves Flora alone and unconscious on the grounds outside the manor) and to commit acts of violence against others (e.g. Peter pushes Hannah into the well, killing her; Peter and Rebecca together attack Dani and restrain her). The “It’s you, it’s me, it’s us,” conceit—with which living people can invite Bly’s ghosts to possess them, the mechanism by which Dani breaks the curse of Bly’s gravity well—is a case of dubious consent at best and abusive, violent control at worst. (“I didn’t agree,” Rebecca says after Peter leaves her body, releasing his “invited” possession of her at the very moment that the lake’s waters start to fill her lungs).

Against these selfish possessions and wrong kinds of love, Jamie and Dani’s love is defined by their selfless refusal to possess one another. A key characteristic of their courtship involves them expressing vulnerability in ways that invite the other to make their own decisions about whether to accept and how to proceed (or not proceed). As we discussed earlier, Dani and Jamie’s first kiss happens after Dani opens up about her guilt surrounding her ex-fiancé’s death. Pausing that kiss, Jamie checks, “You sure?” and only continues after Dani answers with a spoken yes. (Let’s also take this moment to appreciate Amelia Eve’s excellent, whispered “Thank fuck,” that isn’t included in Netflix’s subtitles). Even so, Dani frantically breaks away from her just moments later. But Jamie accepts this and doesn’t push Dani to continue, believing, in fact, that Dani has withdrawn precisely because Jamie has pushed too much already. A week later, Dani takes the initiative to advance their budding romance by inviting Jamie out for a drink—which Jamie accepts by, instead, taking Dani to see her blooming moonflowers that very evening. There, in her own moment of vulnerability, Jamie shares her heart-wrenching and tumultuous backstory with Dani in order to “skip to the end” and spare Dani the effort of getting to know her. By openly sharing these difficult details about herself, Jamie evidently intends to provide Dani with information that would help her decide for herself whether she wants to continue their relationship or not.

Their shared refusal to possess reaches its ultimate culmination in that moment, all those years later, when Dani discovers just how close she’s come to strangling Jamie—and then leaves their home to travel all the way back to Bly and drown herself in the lake because she could “not risk her most important thing, her most important person.” Upon waking to find that Dani has left, Jamie immediately sets off to follow her back to Bly. And in an absolutely heartbreaking, beautiful scene, we see Jamie attempting the “you, me, us,” invitation, desperate for Dani to possess her, for Dani to take Jamie with her. (Y’all, I know I’m critiquing this scene right now, but I also fuckin’ love it, okay? Ugh. The sight of Jamie screaming into the water and helplessly grasping for Dani is gonna stay with me forever. brb while I go cry about it again). Dani, of course, refuses this plea. Because “Dani wouldn’t. Dani would never.” Further emphasizing the nobility of Dani’s actions, Jamie’s narration also reveals that Dani’s self-sacrificial death has not only spared Jamie alone, but has also enabled Dani to take the place of the Lady of the Lake and thereby ensure that no one else can be taken and possessed by Viola’s gravity well ever again.

And so we have the show’s ennoblement of Dani’s magnanimous self-sacrifice. By inviting Viola to possess her, drowning herself to keep from harming Jamie, and then refusing to possess Jamie or anyone else, Dani has effectively saved everyone: the children, the restive souls that have been trapped at Bly, anyone else who may ever come to Bly in the future, and the woman she loves most. Dani has also, then, broken the perpetuation of Bly’s cycles of possession and trauma with her selfless expression of love for Jamie.

The unfortunate effect of all of this is that, quite without meaning to (I think? I hope—), The Haunting of Bly Manor ends up stumbling headlong into a validation of suicide as a selfless act of true love, as a force of protection and salvation.

So, before we proceed, I just want to take this moment to say—definitively, emphatically, as someone who has survived and experienced firsthand the ineffably catastrophic consequences of suicide—that suicide is nothing remotely resembling a selfless “refusal to possess” or an act of love. I’m not going to harp extensively on this, though, because I’d rather not trigger myself for a second time (so far, lol) while writing this essay. Just take my fuckin’ word for it. And before anybody tries to hit me with some excuse like “But Squall, it isn’t that the show is valorizing suicide, it’s that Dani is literally protecting Jamie from Viola,” please consider that I’ve already discussed how the show’s depiction of this lent itself to my own noxious beliefs that “all I do is harm other people with my grief, so maybe I should stop talking to my friends so that they don’t have to deal with me anymore.” Please consider what these narrative details and their allegorical import might tell people who are struggling with their mental health—even if not with suicidal ideation, then with the notion that they should self-sacrificially remove themselves from relationships for the sake of sparing loved ones from (assumed) harm.

Okay, that said, now let’s proceed…‘cause I’ve got even more to say, ‘cause the more I mulled over these details, the more I also came to realize that Dani’s self-sacrificial death in Bly’s conclusion also has the unfortunate effect of undermining some of its other (attempted) themes and its queer representation.

What Bly Manor Tries (and Fails) to Say about Grief and Acceptance

Let’s start by jumping back to a theme we’ve already addressed briefly: moving through one’s grief.

The Haunting of Bly Manor does, in fact, have a lot to say about this. Or…it wants to, more like. On the whole, it seems like it’s trying really hard to give us a cautionary tale about the destructive effects of unprocessed grief and the misplaced guilt that we can wind up carrying around when someone we love dies. The show spends a whole lot of time preaching about how important it is that we learn to accept our losses without allowing them to totally consume us—or without lingering around in denial about them (gettin’ some Kübler-Ross in here, y’all). Sadly, though, it does kind of a half-assed job of it…despite the fact that this is a major recurring theme and a component of the characterizations and storylines of, like, most of its characters. In fact, this fundamentally Kübler-Rossian understanding of what it means to move through grief and to accept loss and mortality appears to be the show’s guiding framework. During his rehearsal dinner speech in the first episode, Owen proclaims that, “To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them,” with such eerie resonance—as the camera stays set on Jamie’s unwavering gaze—that we know that what we’re about to experience is a story about accepting the inevitable losses of the people we love.

Bly Manor is chock full of characters who’re stuck in earlier stages of grief but aren’t really moving along to reach that acceptance stage. I mean, the whole cause of the main supernatural haunting is that Viola so ferociously refuses to accept her death and move on from her rage (brought about by Perdita’s resentment) that she spends centuries strangling whoever she comes across, which then effectively traps them there with her. And the other antagonistic ghostly forces, Rebecca and Peter, also obviously suck at accepting their own deaths, given that they actually believe that possessing two children is a perfectly fine (and splendid) way for them to grasp at some semblance of life again. (Actually…the more that I’ve thought about this, the more that I think each of the pre-acceptance stages of grief in Kübler-Ross’s model may even have a corresponding character to represent it: Hannah is denial; Viola is anger; Peter and Rebecca are bargaining; Henry is depression. Just a little something to chew on).

But let’s talk more at-length about this theme in relation to two characters we haven’t focused on yet: Hannah and Henry. For Hannah, this theme shows up in her struggles to accept that her husband, Sam, has left her (Charlotte wryly burns candles in the chapel as though marking his passing, while Hannah seems to be holding out hope that he might return) and in her persistent denial that Peter-as-Miles has killed her. As a ghost, she determinedly continues going about her daily life and chores even as she’s progressively losing her grip on reality. Henry, meanwhile, won’t issue official notifications of Dominic’s death and continues to collect his mail because doing otherwise would mean admitting to the true finality of Dominic’s loss. At the same time, he is so, completely consumed by his guilt about the role that he believes he played in Charlotte and Dominic’s deaths that he’s haunting himself with an evil alter-ego. His overriding guilt and despair also result in his refusal to be more present in Miles and Flora’s lives—even with the knowledge that Flora is actually his daughter.

In the end, both Hannah and Henry reach some critical moments of acceptance. But, honestly, the show doesn’t do a great job of bringing home this theme of move through your grief with either of them…or with anybody else, really. Peter basically winds up bullying Hannah into recognizing that her broken body is still at the bottom of the well—and then she accepts her own death right in time to make a completely abortive attempt at rescuing Dani and Flora. Henry finally has a preternatural Bad Feeling about things (something about a phone being disconnected? whose phone? Bly’s phone? his phone? I don’t understand), snaps to attention, and rushes to Bly right in time to make an equally abortive rescue attempt that leaves him incapacitated so that his not-quite-ghost can hang out with Hannah long enough to find out that she’s dead. But at least he decides to be an attentive uncle/dad to Miles and Flora after that, I guess. Otherwise, Hannah and Henry get handwaved away pretty quickly before we can really witness what their acceptance means for them in any meaningful detail. (I blame this on some sloppy writing and the way-too-long, all-about-Viola eighth episode. And, on that note, what about the “acceptances” of Rebecca, Peter, and Viola there at the end? Rebecca does get an interesting moment of acceptance—of a sort—with her offer to possess Flora in order to experience Flora’s imminent drowning for her, thereby sparing the child by tucking her in a happy memory. Peter just…disappears at the end with some way-too-late words of apology. Viola’s “acceptance,” however, is tricky…What she accepts is Dani’s invitation to inhabit her. More on this later).

Hannah and Henry’s stories appear to be part of the show’s efforts to warn us about the ways that unprocessed, all-consuming grief can cause us to miss opportunities to have meaningful relationships with others. Hannah doesn’t just miss her chance to be with Owen because…well, she’s dead, but also because of her unwillingness to move on from Sam beforehand. Her denial about her own death, in turn, prevents her from taking the opportunity as a ghost to tell Owen that she loves him. Henry, at least, does figure out that he’s about to lose his chance to be a caring parental figure to his daughter and nephew—but just barely. It takes the near-deaths of him and the children to finally prompt that realization.

Of the cast, Dani gets the most thorough and intentional development of this move through your grief theme. And, importantly, she learns this lesson in time to cultivate a meaningful relationship that she could’ve easily missed out on otherwise. As we’ve already discussed, a critical part of Dani’s character arc involves her realization that she has to directly confront Edmund’s death and start absolving herself of her guilt in order to open up the possibility of a romantic relationship with Jamie. In Episode 4, Jamie’s narration suggests that Dani has had a habit of putting off such difficult processes (whether in regards to moving through her grief, breaking off her engagement to Edmund, or coming to terms with her sexuality), as she’s been constantly deferring to “another night, another time for years and years.” Indeed, the show’s early episodes are largely devoted to showing the consequences of Dani’s deferrals and avoidances. From the very beginning, we see just how intrusively Dani’s unresolved guilt is impacting her daily life and functioning. She covers up mirrors to try to prevent herself from encountering Edmund’s haunting visage, yet still spots him in the reflections of windows and polished surfaces. Panic attacks seem to be regular occurrences for her, sparked by reminders of him. And all of this only gets worse and more disruptive as Dani starts acting on her attraction to Jamie.

It's only after Dani decides to begin moving through her grief and guilt that she’s able to start becoming emotionally and physically intimate with Jamie. And the major turning point for this comes during a scene that features a direct, explicit discussion of the importance of accepting (and even embracing) mortality.

That’s right—it’s time to talk about the moonflower scene.

In a very “I am extremely fed up with people not being able to deal with my traumatic past, so I’m going to tell you about all of the shit that I’ve been through so that you can go ahead and decide whether you want to bolt right now instead of just dropping me later on” move (which…legit, Jamie—I feel that), Jamie sits Dani down at her moonflower patch to give her the full rundown of her own personal backstory and worldview. Her monologue evinces both a profound cynicism and a profound valuation of human life…all of which is also suggestive, to me at least, of a traumatized person who at once desperately wishes for intimate connection, but who’s also been burned way too many times (something with which I am wholly unfamiliar, lol). She characterizes people as “exhaustive effort with very little to show for it,” only to go on to wax poetic about how human mortality is as beautiful as the ephemeral buds of a moonflower. This is, in essence, Jamie’s sorta convoluted way of articulating that whole “To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them” idea.

After detailing her own past, Jamie shifts gears to suggest that she believes that cultivating a relationship with Dani—like the devoted work of growing a tropical, transient Ipomoea alba in England—might be worth the effort. And as part of this cultivation work, Jamie then acknowledges Dani’s struggles with her guilt, while also firmly encouraging her to move through it by accepting the beauty of mortality:  

“I know you’re carrying this guilt around, but I also know that you don’t decide who lives and who doesn’t. I’m sorry Dani, but you don’t. Humans are organic. It’s a fact. We’re meant to die. It’s natural…beautiful. […] We leave more life behind to take our place. Like this moonflower. It’s where all its beauty lies, you know. In the mortality of the thing.”

After that, Jamie and Dani are finally able to make out unimpeded.

Frustratingly, though, Jamie’s own dealings with grief, loss, and trauma remain terribly understated throughout the show. Her monologue in the moonflower scene is really the most insight that we ever get. Jamie consistently comes off as better equipped to contend with life’s hardships than many of Bly’s other characters; and she is, in fact, the sole member of the cast who is confirmed to have ever had any sort of professional therapy. She regularly demonstrates a remarkable sense of empathy and emotional awareness, able to pick up on others’ needs and then support them accordingly, though often in gruff, tough-love forms. Further, there are numerous scenes in which we see Jamie bestowing incisive guidance for handling difficult situations: the moonflower scene, her advice to Rebecca about contacting Henry after Peter’s disappearance, and her suggestion to Dani that Flora needs to see a psychologist, to name just a few. As such, Jamie appears to have—or, at least, projects—a sort of unflappable groundedness that sets her apart from everyone else in the show.

Bly only suggests that Jamie’s struggles run far deeper than she lets on. There are a few times that we witness quick-tempered outbursts (usually provoked by Miles) and hints of bottled-up rage. Lest we forget, although it was Flora who first found Rebecca’s dead body floating in the water, it was Jamie who then found them both immediately thereafter. We see this happen, but we never learn anything about the impact that this must have had on her. Indeed, Jamie’s exposure to the layered, compounding grief at Bly has no doubt inflicted a great deal of pain on her, suggested by details like her memorialization of Charlotte and Dominic during the bonfire scene. If we look past her flippancy, there must be more than a few grains of truth to that endless well of deep, inconsolable tears—but Jamie never actually shares what they might be. Moreover, although the moonflower scene reveals the complex traumas of her past, we never get any follow-up or elaboration about those details or Dani’s observation of the scar on her shoulder. For the most part, Jamie’s grief goes unspoken.

There’s a case to be made that these omissions are a byproduct of narrator Jamie decentering herself in a story whose primary focus is Dani. Narrator Jamie even claims that the story she’s telling “isn’t really my story. It belongs to someone I knew” (yes, it’s a diversionary tactic to keep us from learning her identity too soon—but she also means it). And in plenty of respects, the telling of the story is, itself, Jamie’s extended expression of her grief. By engaging in this act of oral storytelling to share Dani’s sacrifice with others—especially with those who would have otherwise forgotten—Jamie is performing an important ritual of mourning her wife. Still, it’s for exactly these reasons that I think it would’ve been valuable for the show to include more about the impacts that grief, loss, and trauma had on Jamie prior to Dani’s death. Jamie’s underdevelopment on this front feels more like a disappointing oversight of the show’s writing than her narrator self’s intentional, careful withholding of information. Additionally, I think that Bly leaves Jamie’s grieving on an…odd note (though, yes, I know I’m just a curmudgeonly outlier here). Those saccharine final moments of Jamie filling up the bathtub and sleeping on a chair so that she can face the cracked doorway are a little too heavy-handedly tear-jerking for my liking. And while this, too, may be a ritual of mourning after the undoubtedly taxing effort of telling Dani’s story, it may also suggest that Jamie is demurring her own acceptance of Dani’s death. Is the hand on her shoulder really Dani’s ghost? Or is it Jamie’s own hopeful fabrication that her wife’s spirit is watching over her? (Or—to counter my own point here and suggest a different alternative—could this latter idea (i.e. the imagining of Dani’s ghost) also be another valid manner of “accepting” a loss by preserving a loved one’s presence? “Dead doesn’t mean gone,” after all. …Anyway, maybe I would be more charitable to this scene if not for the hokey, totally out-of-place song. Coulda done without that, seriously).

But let’s jump back to the moonflower scene. For Dani, this marks an important moment in the progression of her own movement through grief. In combination, her newfound readiness to contend with her guilt and her eagerness to grow closer to Jamie enable Dani to find a sense of peace that she hasn’t experienced since Eddie’s death…or maybe ever, really (hang on to this thought for this essay’s final section, too). When she and Jamie sleep together for the first time, not only does Dani actually sleep well, but she also wakes the next morning to do something that she hasn’t done to that point and won’t do again: she comfortably looks into a mirror. (One small qualification to this: Dani does look into her own reflection at the diner when she and Jamie are on their road trip; Viola doesn’t interfere then, but whether this is actually a comfortable moment is questionable). Then, shifting her gaze away from her own reflection, she sees Jamie still sleeping soundly in her bed—and smiles. It’s a fleeting moment of peace. Immediately after that, she spots Flora out the window, which throws everything back into accumulating turmoil. But that moment of peace, however fleeting, is still a powerful one.

However, Bly teases this narrative about the possibilities of finding healing in the wake of traumatic loss—especially through the cultivation of meaningful and supportive relationships with others—only to then totally pull that rug out from under Dani in the final episode.

During that final episode, we see that Dani’s shared life with Jamie has supported her in coming to terms with Viola’s lurking presence, such that “at long last, deep within the au pair’s heart, there was peace. And that peace held for years, which is more than some of us ever get.” But it’s at the exact moment that that line of narration occurs that we then begin to witness Dani’s steady, inexorable decline. Sure, we could say that Dani “accepts” Viola’s intrusions and the unavoidable eventuality that the ghost will seize control of her. But this isn’t a healthy acceptance or even a depiction of the fraught relationships that we can have with grief and trauma as we continue to process them throughout our lives. At all. Instead, it’s a distinctive, destructive sense of fatalism.

“I’m not even scared of her anymore,” Dani tells Jamie as the flooded bathtub spills around them. “I just stare at her and it's getting harder and harder to see me. Maybe I should just accept that. Maybe I should just accept that and go.” Remember way back at the beginning of this essay when I pointed out that there’s a significant difference between “moving through one’s grief” and allowing one’s grief to become all-consuming? Well, by the time we reach the bathtub scene, Dani’s grief and trauma have completely overtaken her. Her “acceptance” is, thus, a fatalistic, catastrophizing determination that her trauma defines her existence, such that she believes that all she has left to do is give up her life in order to protect Jamie from her. For a less ghostly (and less suicidal ideation-y) and more real-life example to illustrate what I’m getting at here: this would be like me saying “I should just accept that I’m never going to be anything other than a traumatized mess and should stop reaching out to my friends so that I don’t keep hurting them by making them deal with what a mess I am.” If I said something like this, I suspect (hope) that you would tell me that this is not a productive acceptance, but a pernicious narrative that only hurts me and the people who care about me. Sadly, though, this kind of pernicious narrative is exactly what we get out of Bly’s ending allegory.

“But Squall,” you may be thinking, “this scene is representing how people who struggle with their mental health can actually feel. This is exactly what it can be like to have severe mental illness, even for folks who have strong support systems and healthy, meaningful relationships. And there’s value in showing that.”

And if you’re thinking that, then first of all—as I have indicated already—I am aware that this is what it can be like. Very aware. And second of all, you make a fair point, but…there are ways that the show could’ve represented this without concluding that representation with a suicide that it effectively valorizes. I’ll contend with this more in the final section, where I offer a few suggestions of other ways that Bly could’ve ended instead.

I just want to be absolutely clear that I’m not saying that I think all media portrayals of mental illness need to be hopeful or wholesome or end in “positive” ways. But what I am saying is that Bly’s conclusion offers a really fuckin’ bleak outlook on grief, trauma, and mental illness, especially when we fit that ending into the framework of the show’s other (attempted) core themes, as well as Dani’s earlier character development. It’s especially bleak to see this as someone with severe mental health issues and who has also lost a loved one to suicide—and as someone who desperately hopes that my life and worldview won’t always stay so darkly colored by my trauma.

Additionally, it’s also worth pausing here to acknowledge that fatalism is, in fact, a major theme of The Beast in the Jungle, the 1903 Henry James novella on which the ninth episode is loosely based. I confess that I’ve only read about this novella, but haven’t read the story itself. However, based on my (admittedly limited) understanding of it, there appears to be a significant thematic rupture between The Beast in the Jungle and The Haunting of Bly Manor in their treatments of fatalism. In the end of the novella, its protagonist, John Marcher, comes to the realization that his fatalism has been a horrible mistake that has caused him to completely miss out on an opportunity for love that was right in front of him all along. The tragic fate to which Marcher believed that he was doomed was, in the end, his own fatalism. Dani, in contrast, never has this moment of recognition, not only because her fatalism leads to her own death, but also because the show treats her fatalism not as something that keeps her from love, but instead as leading her towards a definitive act of love.

All of this is exactly why Dani’s portrayal has become so damn concerning to me, and why I don’t believe that Bly’s allegory of “this is what it’s like to live with mental illness and/or to love (and lose) someone who is mentally ill” is somehow value-neutral—or, worse, something worth celebrating.

How Dani’s Self-Sacrifice Bears on Bly’s Queer Representation

In my dabblings around the fandom so far, I’ve seen a fair amount of deliberation about whether or not Bly Manor’s ending constitutes an example of the Bury Your Gays trope.

Honestly, though, I am super unenthused about rehashing those deliberations or splitting hairs trying to give some definitive “yes it is” or “no it isn’t” answer, so…I’m just not going to. Instead, I’m going to offer up some further observations about how Dani’s self-sacrificial death impinges on Bly’s queer representation, regardless of whether Bury Your Gays is at work here or not.

I would also like to humbly submit that the show could’ve just…not fucked around in proximity of that trope in the first place so that we wouldn’t even need to be having these conversations.

But anyway. I’m going to start this section off with a disclaimer.

Even though I’m leveling some pretty fierce critiques in this section (and across this essay), I do also want to say that I adore that The Haunting of Bly Manor and its creators gave us a narrative that centers two queer women and their romantic relationship as its driving forces and that intentionally sets out to portray the healing potentials of sapphic love as a contrast to the destructive, coercive harms found in many conventional dynamics of hegemonic heteronormativity. I don’t want to downplay that, because I’m extremely happy that this show exists, and I sincerely believe that many elements of its representation are potent and meaningful and amazing. But…I also have some reservations with this portrayal that I want to share. I critique not because I don’t love, but because I do love. I love this show a lot. I love Dani and Jamie a lot. I critique because I love and because I want more and better in future media.

So, that being said…let’s move on to talk about Dani, self-sacrifice, and compulsory heterosexuality.

Well before Dani’s ennobled death, Bly establishes self-sacrifice as a core component of her characterization. It’s hardwired into her, no doubt due to the relentless, entangled educational work of compulsory heterosexuality (comphet) and the aggressive forms of socialization that tell girls and women that their roles in life are to sacrifice themselves in order to please others and to belong to men. Indeed, Episode 4’s series of flashbacks emphasizes the interconnectedness between comphet and Dani’s beliefs that she is supposed to sacrifice herself for others’ sakes, revealing how these forces have shaped who she is and the decisions that she’s made across her life. (While we’re at it, let’s also not lose sight of the fact that Dani’s profession during this time period is one that—in American culture, at least—has come to rely on a distinctively feminized self-sacrificiality in order to function. Prior to becoming an au pair, Dani was a schoolteacher. In fact, in one of Episode 4’s flashbacks, Eddie’s mother points out that she appreciates Dani’s knack for identifying the kids that need her the most, but also reminds Dani that she needs to take care of herself…which suggests that Dani hadn’t been: “Save them all if you can, but put your own oxygen mask on first”).

In the flashback of her engagement party, Dani’s visible discomfort during Edmund’s speech clues us in that she wasn’t preparing to marry him because she genuinely wanted to, but because she felt like she was supposed to. The “childhood sweethearts” narrative bears down on the couple, celebrated by their friends and family, vaunted by cultural constructs that prize this life trajectory as a cherished, “happily ever after” ideal. Further illustrating the pressures to which Dani had been subject, the same scene shows Eddie’s mother, Judy O’Mara, presenting Dani with her own wedding dress and asking Dani to wear it when she marries Eddie. Despite Mrs. O’Mara’s assurances that Dani can say no, the hopes that she heaps onto Dani make abundantly clear that anything other than a yes would disappoint her. Later, another flashback shows Dani having that dress sized and fitted while her mother and Mrs. O’Mara look on and chatter about their own weddings and marriages. Their conversation is imbued with further hopes that Dani’s marriage to Edmund will improve on the mistakes that they made in their lives. Meanwhile, Dani’s attentiveness to the tailor who takes her measurements, compliments her body, and places a hand on her back strongly suggests that Dani is suppressing her attraction to women. Though brief, this scene is a weighty demonstration of the ways that the enclosures of heteronormativity constrain women into believing that their only option is to deny homosexual attraction, to forfeit their own desires in order to remain in relationships with men, and to prioritize the hopes and dreams and aspirations of the people around them above their own.

Dani followed this pathway—determined for her by everyone else except herself—until she couldn’t anymore.

During the flashback of their breakup, Dani explains to Eddie that she didn’t end their relationship sooner because she thought that even just having desires that didn’t match his and his family’s was selfish of her: “I should’ve said something sooner. […] I didn’t want to hurt you, or your mom, or your family. And then it was just what we were doing. […] I just thought I was being selfish, that I could just stick it out, and eventually I would feel how I was supposed to.” As happens to so many women, Dani was on the cusp of sacrificing her life for the sake of “sticking out” a marriage to a man, all because she so deeply believed that it was her duty to satisfy everyone’s expectations of her and that it was her responsibility to change her own feelings about that plight.

And Eddie’s response to this is telling. “Fuck you, Danielle,” he says. “Why are you doing this to me?”

Pay close attention to those last two words. Underline ‘em. Bold ‘em. Italicize ‘em.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

With those two words, Eddie indicates that he views Dani’s refusal to marry him as something that she is doing to him, a harm that she is committing against him. It is as though Dani is inflicting her will on him, or even that she is unjustly attackinghim by finally admitting that her desires run contrary to his own, that she doesn’t want to be his wife. And with this statement, he confirms precisely what she anticipated would happen upon giving voice to her true feelings.

What space did Edmund, his family, or Dani’s mother ever grant for Dani to have aspirations of her own that weren’t towards the preordained role of Eddie’s future wife? Let’s jump back to that engagement party. Eddie’s entire speech reveals a very longstanding assumption of his claim over her as his wife-to-be. He’d first asked Dani to marry him when they were ten years old, after he mistakenly believed that their first kiss could get Dani pregnant; Dani turned him down then, saying that they were too young. So, over the years, as they got older, Eddie continued to repeatedly ask her—until, presumably, she relented. “Now, we’re still pretty young,” he remarks as he concludes his speech, “but I think we’re old enough to know what we want.” Significantly, Eddie speaks here not just for himself, but also for Dani. Dani’s voice throughout the entire party is notably absent, as Eddie and his mother both impose their own wishes on her, assume that she wants what they want, and don’t really open any possibility for her to say otherwise. Moreover, although there’s a palpable awkwardness that accompanies Eddie’s story, the crowd at the party chuckles along as though it’s a sweet, innocent tale of lifelong love and devotion, and not an instance of a man whittling away at a woman’s resistance until she finally caved to his pursuit of her.

All of this suggests that Eddie shared in the socialized convictions of heteropatriarchy, according to which Dani’s purpose and destiny were to marry him and to make him happy. His patterns of behavior evince the unquestioned presumptions of so many men: that women exist in service to them and their wants, such that it is utterly inconceivable that women could possibly desire otherwise. As a political institution, heteropatriarchy tells men that they are entitled to women’s existences, bodies, futures. And, indeed, Eddie can’t seem to even imagine that Dani could ever want anything other than the future that he has mapped out for them. (Oh, hey look, we’ve got some love vs. possession going on here again).

For what it’s worth, I think that the show’s portrayal of compulsory heterosexuality is excellent. I love that the writers decided to tackle this. Like I mentioned at the beginning, I found all of this to be extremelyrelatable. I might even be accused of over-relating and projecting my own experiences onto my readings here, but…there were just too many resonances between Dani’s experiences and my own. Mrs. O’Mara’s advice to Dani to “put your own oxygen mask on first” is all too reminiscent of the ways that my ex’s parents would encourage me to “heal” from my brother’s loss…but not for the sake of my own wellbeing, but so that I would return to prioritizing the care of their son and existing to do whatever would make him happy. I’ll also share here that what drove me to break up with my ex-fiancé wasn’t just his unwillingness to contend with my grief, but the fact that he had decided that the best way for me to heal from my loss would be to have a baby. He insisted that I could counteract my brother’s death by “bringing new life into the world.” And he would not take no for an answer. He told me that if I wouldn’t agree to try to have children in the near future, then he wasn’t interested in continuing to stay with me. It took me months to pluck up the courage, but I finally answered this ultimatum by ending our relationship myself. Thus, like Dani, I came very close to sacrificing myself, my wants, my body, my future, and my life for the sake of doing what my fiancé and his family wanted me to do, all while painfully denying my own attraction to women. What kept me from “sticking it out” any longer was that I finally decided that I wasn’t going to sacrifice myself for a man I didn’t love (and who clearly didn’t love me) and decided, instead, to reclaim my own wants and needs away from him.

For Dani, however, the moment that she finally begins to reclaim her wants and needs away from Eddie is also the moment that he furiously jumps out of the driver’s seat and into the path of a passing truck, which leaves her to entangle those events as though his death is her fault for finally asserting herself.

Of course, the guilt that Dani feels for having “caused” Eddie’s death isn’t justa matter of breaking up with him and thereby provoking a reaction that would prove fatal—it’s also the guilt of her suppressed homosexual desire, of not desiring Eddie in the first place. In other words, internalized homophobia is an inextricable layer of the culpability that Dani feels. Internalized homophobia is also what’s haunting her. As others (such as Rowan Ellis, whose deep dive includes a solid discussion of internalized homophobia in Bly, as well as a more at-length examination of Bury Your Gays than I’m providing here) have pointed out, the show highlights this metaphorically by having Dani literally get locked into a closet with Edmund’s ghost in the very first episode. Further reinforcing this idea is the fact that these spectral visions get even worse as Dani starts to come to terms with and act on her attraction to Jamie, as though the ghost is punishing her for her desires. Across Episode 3, as Dani and Jamie begin spending more time together, Edmund’s ghost concurrently begins materializing in more shocking, visceral forms (e.g. his bleeding hand in Dani’s bed; his shadowy figure lurking behind Dani after she’s held Jamie’s hand) that exceed the reflective surfaces to which he’d previously been confined. This continues into Episode 4, where each of Eddie’s appearances follows moments of Dani’s growing closeness to Jamie. A particularly alarming instance occurs when Dani just can’t seem to pry her gaze away from a dressed-up Jamie who’s in the process of some mild undressing. Finally turning away from Jamie, Dani becomes aware of Eddie’s hands on her hips. It’s a violating reminder of his claims over her, horrifying in its invocation of men’s efforts to coerce and control women’s sexuality.

It is incredibly powerful, then, to watch Dani answer all of this by becoming more resolute and assertive in the expression of her wants and needs. The establishment of her romantic relationship with Jamie isn’t just the movement through grief and guilt that we discussed earlier; it’s also Dani’s defiance of compulsory heterosexuality and her fierce claiming of her queer existence. Even in the face of all that’s been haunting her, Dani initiates her first kiss with Jamie; and Eddie’s intrusion in that moment is only enough to temporarily dissuade her, as Dani follows this up by then asking Jamie out for a drink at the pub to “see where that takes them” (i.e. up to Jamie’s flat to bang, obviously). The peace that Dani finds after having sex with Jamie for the first time is, therefore, also the profound fulfillment of at last having her first sexual experience with a woman, of finally giving expression to this critical part of herself that she’d spent her entire life denying. Compulsory heterosexuality had dictated to Dani that she must self-sacrifice to meet the strictures of heteropatriarchy, to please everyone except herself; but in her relationship with Jamie, Dani learns that she doesn’t have to do this at all. This is only bolstered by the fact that, as we’ve talked about at length already, Jamie is very attentive to Dani’s needs and respectful of her boundaries. Jamie doesn’t want Dani to do anything other than what Dani wants to do. And so, in the cultivation of their romantic partnership, Dani thus comes to value her own wants and needs in a way that she hasn’t before.

The fact that the show nails all of this so fucking well is what makes all that comes later so goddamn frustrating.

The final episode chronicles Dani and Jamie forging a queer life together that the rest of us can only dream of, including another scene of Dani flouting homophobia and negotiating her own internal struggles so that she can be with Jamie. “I know we can’t technically get married,” she tells Jamie when she proposes to her, “but I also don’t really care.” And with her awareness that the beast in the jungle is starting to catch up with her, Dani tells Jamie that she wants to spend whatever time she has left with her.

But then…

A few scenes later—along with a jump of a few years later, presumably—Jamie arrives home with the licenses that legally certify their civil union in the state of Vermont. It’s a monumental moment. In 2000, Vermont became the first state to introduce civil unions, which paved the way for it to later (in 2009) become the first state to pass legislation that recognized gay marriages without needing to have a court order mandating that the state extend marriage rights beyond opposite-sex couples. I appreciate that Bly’s creatorsincorporated this significant milestone in the history of American queer rights into the show. But its positioning in the show also fuckin’ sucks. Just as Jamie is announcing the legality of her and Dani’s civil union and declaring that they’ll have another marriage ceremony soon, we see water running into the hallway. This moves us into that scene with the flooded bathtub, as Jamie finds Dani staring into the water, unaware of anything else except the reflection of Viola staring back at her. Thus, it is at the exact moment when her wife proudly shares the news of this incredible achievement in the struggle for queer rights—for which queer folks have long fought and are continuing to fight to protect in the present—that Dani has completely, hopelessly resigned herself to Viola’s possession.

I want to be careful to clarify here that, in making this observation, I don’t mean to posit some sort of “Dani should have fought back against Viola” argument, which—within the context of our allegorical readings—might have the effect of damagingly suggesting that Dani should have fought harder to recover from mental illness or terminal disease. But I do mean to point out the incredibly grim implications that the juxtaposition of these events engenders, especially when we contemplate them (as we did in the previous section) within the overall frameworks of the show’s themes and Dani’s character development. After all that has come before, after we’ve watched Dani come to so boldly assert her queer desire and existence, it is devastating to see the show reduce her to such a despairing state that doesn’t even give her a chance to register that she and Jamie are now legal partners.

Why did you have to do this, Bly? Why?

Further compounding this despair, the next scene features the resumption of Dani’s self-sacrificial beliefs and behaviors, which results in her demise, and which leaves Jamie to suffer through the devastation of her wife’s death. This resumption of self-sacrifice hence demolishes all of that beautiful work of asserting Dani’s queer existence and learning that she doesn’t need to sacrifice herself that I just devoted two thousand words to describing above.

Additionally, in the end, Dani’s noble self-sacrifice also effects a safe recuperation of heteronormativity…which might add more evidence to a Bury Your Gays claim, oops.

And that is because, in the end, after we see Jamie screaming into the water and Dani forever interred at the bottom of the lake in which she drowned herself, we come to the end of Jamie’s story and return to Bly Manor’s frame narrative: Flora’s wedding.

At the start of the show, the evening of Flora and Unnamed Man’s (Wikipedia says his name is James? idk, w/e) rehearsal dinner provides the occasion and impetus for Jamie’s storytelling. Following dinner, Flora, her fiancé, and their guests gather around a fireplace and discuss a ghost story about the venue, a former convent. With a captive audience that includes her primary targets—Flora and Miles, who have forgotten what happened at Bly and, by extension, all that Dani sacrificed and that Jamie lost so that they could live their lives free of the trauma of what transpired—and with a topically relevant conversation already ongoing, Jamie interjects that she has a ghost story of her own to share…and thus, the show’s longer, secondary narrative begins.

When Jamie’s tale winds to a close at the end of the ninth episode, the show returns us to its frame, that scene in front of the cozy, crackling fire. And it is there that we learn that it is, in fact, Jamie who has been telling us this story all along.

As the other guests trickle away, Flora stays behind to talk to Jamie on her own. A critical conversation then ensues between them, which functions not only as Jamie’s shared wisdom to Flora, but also as the show’s attempt to lead viewers through what they’ve just experienced and thereby impart its core message about the secondary narrative. The frame narrative is, thus, also a direct address to the audience that tells us what we should take away from the experience. By this point, the show has thoroughly established that Jamie is a gentle-but-tough-love, knowledgeable, and trustworthy guide through the trials of accepting grief and mortality, and so it is Jamie who leaves Flora and us, the audience, with the show’s final word about how to treasure the people we love while they are still in our lives and how to grieve them if we survive beyond them. (But, by this point in this essay, we’ve also learned that Bly’s messages about grief and mortality are beautiful but also messy and unconvincing, even with this didactic ending moment).

With all of this in mind, we can (and should) ask some additional questions of the frame narrative.

One of those questions is: Why is the secondary narrative being told from/within this particular frame?

Answering this question within the show’s diegesis (by asking it of the narrator) is easy enough. Jamie is performing a memorialization of Dani’s life and sacrifice at an event where her intended audience happens to be gathered, ensuring that Miles and Flora begin to recognize what Dani did for them in a manner that maybe won’t just outright traumatize them.

Okay, sure, yeah. True. Not wrong.

But let’s interrogate this question more deeply—let’s ask it of the show itself. So, Bly Manor: Why is the secondary narrative being told from/within this particular frame?

We could also tweak this question a bit to further consider: What is the purpose of the frame? A frame narrative can function to shape audiences’ interpretations of and attitudes towards the secondary narrative. So, in this case, let’s make our line of questioning even more specific. What does the frame of Flora’s wedding do for Bly’s audiences?

Crucially, the framing scene at the fireplace provides us with a sense that we’ve returned to safety after the horror of the ghost story we’ve just experienced. To further assure us of this safety, then, Bly’s frame aims to restore a sense of normality, a sense that the threat that has provoked fear in us has been neutralized, a sense of hope that endures beyond tragedy. Indeed, as we fade from the secondary narrative and return to the frame, Jamie’s narration emphasizes how Dani’s selfless death has brought peace to Bly Manor by breaking its cycles of violence and trauma: “But she won’t be hollow or empty, and she won’t pull others to her fate. She will merely walk the grounds of Bly, harmless as a dove for all of her days, leaving the only trace of who she once was in the memory of the woman who loved her most.”

What Dani has accomplished with her self-sacrifice, then, is a longstanding, prevailing, expected staple of Western—and especially American—storytelling: redemption.

American media is rife with examples of this narrative formula (in which an individual must take selfless action—which may or may not involve self-sacrificial death—in order to redeem an imperiled community by restoring a threatened order) to an extent that is kind of impossible to overstate. Variations of this formula are everywhere, from film to television to comics to videogames to news reports. It is absolutely fundamental to our cultural understandings of what “heroism” means. And it’s been this way for, umm…a long time, largely thanks to that most foundational figure of Western myth, some guy who was crucified for everybody’s sins or something. (Well, that and the related popularization of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, but…I’m not gonna go off onto a whole rant about that right now, this essay is already too long as it is).

In Bly Manor, the threatened order is the natural process of death itself, which Viola has disrupted with a gravity well that traps souls and keeps them suspended within physical proximity of the manor. Dani’s invitation to Viola is the initial step towards salvation (although, I think it’s important to note that this is not entirely intentional on Dani’s part. Jamie’s narration indicates that Dani didn’t entirely understand what she was doing with the “It’s you, it’s me, it’s us” invitation, so self-sacrifice was not necessarily her initial goal). It nullifies the gravity well and resumes the passage of death, which liberates all of the souls that have been trapped at Bly and also produces additional opportunities for others’ atonements (e.g. Peter’s apology to Miles; Henry’s guardianship of the children). But it’s Dani’s suicide that is the ultimate completion of the redemptive task. It is only by “giving herself to the lake” that Dani is able to definitively dispel Viola’s threat and confer redemptive peace to Bly Manor.

It’s tempting to celebrate this incredibly rare instance of a queer woman in the heroic-redemptive role, given that American media overwhelmingly reserve it for straight men. But I want to strongly advise that we resist this temptation. Frankly, there’s a lot about the conventional heroic-redemptive narrative formula that sucks, and I’d rather that we work to advocate for other kinds of narratives, instead of just championing more “diversity” within this stuffy old model of heroism. Explaining what sucks about this formula is beyond the purview of this essay, though. But my next point might help to illustrate part of why it sucks (spoiler: it’s because it tends to prop up traditional, dominant structures of power and relationality).

So…What I want us to do is entertain the possibility that Dani’s redemptive self-sacrifice might serve specific purposes for straight audiences, especially in the return to the frame at the end.

Across The Haunting of Bly Manor, we’ve seen ample examples of heterosexuality gone awry. The show has repeatedly called our attention to the flaws and failings of heterosexual relationships against the carefully cultivated safety, open communication, and mutual fulfillment of a queer romance between two women. But, while queer audiences may celebrate this about this show, for straight audiences, this whole situation might just wind up producing anxiety instead—as though heterosexuality is also a threatened order within the world of Bly Manor. More generally, asking straight audiences to connect with a queer couple as the show’s main protagonists is an unaccustomed challenge with which they’re not normally tasked; thus, the show risks leaving this dominant viewer base uncomfortable, threatened, and resentful, sitting with the looming question of whether heterosexuality is, itself, redeemable.

In answer to this, Dani’s self-sacrifice provides multiple assurances to straight audiences. To begin with, her assumption of the traditional heroic-redemptive role secures audiences within the familiar confines of that narrative formula, which also then promises that Dani is acting as a protector of threatened status quos and not as another source of peril. What Bly Manor is doing here is, in effect, acknowledging that it may have challenged (and even threatened) straight audiences with its centerpiece of a queer romance—and that, likewise, queers themselves may be challenging the status quos of romantic partnerships by, for instance, demanding marriage rights and improvements in media representations—while also emphatically reassuring those audiences in the wake of that challenge that Dani and Jamie haven’t created and aren’t going to create too much disturbance with their queerness. They’re really not that threatening, Bly swears. They’re harmless as a dove. They’re wholesome. They’re respectable. They—and queer folks more generally—aren’t going to totally upend everything, really. Look, they’ll even sacrifice themselves to save everyone and redeem imperiled communities and threatened orders—even heterosexuality itself!

A critical step towards achieving this assurance is the leveling of the playing field. In order for the show to neutralize the threat of queerness for straight audiences, comfort them with a return to safety, and promise them that heterosexuality is redeemable, the queer women need to have an on-screen tragic end to their relationship just like all of the straight couples have. And so, Dani must die and Jamie must grieve.

That accomplished, the show then immediately returns to the frame, the scene at the fireplace following Flora’s rehearsal dinner.

There—after we’ve witnessed so much queer joy and queer tragedy crammed into this final episode—we see Flora and her fiancé, bride and groom, sitting together, arms linked, taking in all that Jamie has to tell them. And with this warm, idyllic image of impending matrimony between man and wife, the safety to which straight audiences return in the frame is, therefore, also the safety of a heterosexuality that can find its redemption through Dani’s self-sacrifice. Not only does Dani’s death mean that Flora can live (and go on to marry her perfectly bland, unremarkable husband, all without the trauma of what happened at Bly), but it also means that she—and, with her, straight audiences—can ultimately benefit from the lessons about true love, loss, and grieving that Dani’s self-sacrifice and Jamie’s story bestow.

And so, Bly Manor concludes with a valorization of redemptive self-sacrifice and an anodyne recuperation of heteronormativity, bequeathing Flora with the opportunities to have and to hold the experiential knowledge that Dani and Jamie have provided for her. Here, queer tragedy serves up an educational opportunity for heterosexual audiences in a challengingly “inclusive,” but otherwise essentially non-threatening manner. The ending is a gentle, non-traumatizing, yet frank lesson to heterosexual audiences in the same way that Jamie’s story is a gentle, non-traumatizing, yet frank lesson to Flora.

Did the show’s creators intentionally do all of this to set about providing such assurances to straight audiences? Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t really know—or care! But, especially in light of incidents like the recent “Suletta and Miorine’s relationship is up to interpretation” controversy following the Gundam: Witch from Mercury finale, I absolutely do not put it past media corporations and content creators to very intentionally take steps to prioritize the comfort of straight audiences against the threats of queer love. And anyway, intentional or not, all of this still has effects and implications loaded with meaning, as I have tried to account for here.

Honestly, though, I can’t quite shake the feeling that there’s some tension between Jamie, Owen, and maybe also Henry about Jamie’s decision to publicly share Dani’s story in front of Flora and Miles. Owen’s abrupt declaration that it’s getting late and that they should wrap up seems like an intervention—like he’s been as patient and understanding as he possibly could up to that point, but now, he’s finally having to put a stop to Jamie’s deviance. I can’t help but read the meaningful stares that pass between them at both ends of the frame as a complex mixture of compassion and fraught disagreement (and I wish that the show had done more with this). The scene where Dani and Jamie visit Owen at his restaurant seems to set up the potential for this unspoken dispute. By their expressions and mannerisms (Dani’s stony stare; the protective way that Jamie holds her as her own gaze is locked on Dani), it’s clear that Dani and Jamie are aghast that Flora and Miles have forgotten what happened and that Owen believes that they should just be able to live their lives without that knowledge. And it’s also clear, by her very telling of Dani’s story, that Jamie disagrees with him. Maybe I’m over-imposing my own attitudes here, but I’m left with the impression that Jamie resents the coddling of Miles and Flora just like I’m resenting the coddling of straight audiences…that Jamie resents that she and Dani have had to give up everything so that Miles and Flora can continue living their privileged lives just like I’m resenting the exploitation of queer tragedy for the sake preserving straight innocence. (As Jamie says to Hannah when Dani puts the children to work in the garden: “You can’t give them a pass forever.” Disclaimer: I’m not saying that I want Miles and Flora to be traumatized, but I am saying that I agree with Jamie, because hiding traumatic shit is not how to resolve inter-generational trauma. Anyway—).

Also, I don’t know about y’all, but I find Flora and Jamie’s concluding conversation to be super cringe. Maybe it’s because I’m gay and just have way too much firsthand experience with this sort of thing from my own comphet past, but Flora’s whole “I just keep thinking about that silly, gorgeous, insane man I’m marrying tomorrow. I love him. More than I ever thought I could love anybody. And the crazy thing is, he loves me the same exact amount,” spiel just absolutely screams “woman who is having to do all of the emotional work in her relationship with an absolutely dull, mediocre, emotionally illiterate man and is desperately trying to convince herself that he does, in fact, love her as much as she (believes) that she loves him.”

I feel like this is a parody of straightness?? Is this actually sincere??

This is what Dani gave up her life to redeem??

To me, this is just more bleak shit that Bly leaves us with. It is so painful to watch.

Bless.

Okay, so I know that I said that I wasn’t going to offer a definitive yes or no about whether Bly commits Bury Your Gays with Dani’s death, but…after writing all of this out, I’m honestly kinda leaning towards a yes.

But I’m already anticipating that folks are gonna push back against me on this. So I just want to humbly submit, again, that Bly could have just not done this. It could have just not portrayed Dani’s death at all.

To really drive this point home, then, I’m going to conclude this essay by suggesting just a few ways that The Haunting of Bly Manor could have ended without Dani’s self-sacrificial death—or without depicting her death on-screen at all.

Bly Manor Could Have Ended Differently

Mike Flanagan—creator, director, writer, editor, executive producer, showrunner, etc. of The Haunting of Bly Manor—has stated that he believes that the show’s ending is a happy one.

I, on the other hand, believe that Bly’s ending is…not. In my view, the way that the ending treats Dani is unnecessarily cruel and exploitative. “Happy ending”—really? If I let myself be cynical about it (which I do), I honestly think that Dani’s death is a pretty damn transparent effort to squeeze out some tears with a sloppy, mawkish, feel-good veneer slapped over it. And if we peel back that veneer and look under it, what we find is quite bleak.

To be fair, for a psychological horror show that’s so centrally about grief and trauma, Bly Manor does seem to profess an incredibly strong sense of hopefulness. Underlying the entirety of the show is a profound faith in all the good and beauty that can come from human connection, however fleeting our lives may be—and even if we make a ton of dumb, awful mistakes along the way. If I’m being less cynical about it, I do also think that the show’s ending strives to demonstrate a peak expression of this conviction. But—at least in my opinion—it doesn’t succeed in this goal. In my writing of this essay, I’ve come to believe that the show instead ends in a state of despair that is at odds with what it appears to want to achieve.

So, in this final section, I’m going to offer up a few possibilities for ways that the show could have ended that maybe wouldn’t have so thoroughly undermined its own attempted messages.

Now, if I were actually going to fix the ending of The Haunting of Bly Manor, I would honestly overhaul a ton of the show to arrive at something completely different. But I’m not going to go through all the trouble of rewriting the entire show here, lol. Instead, I’m going to work with most of what’s already there, leading out from Viola’s possession of Dani (even though I don’t actually like that part of the show either – maybe someday I’ll write about other implications of Viola’s possession of Dani beyond these allegorical readings, but not right now). I’m also going to try to adhere to some of the show’s core themes and build on some of the allegorical possibilities that are already in place. Granted, the ideas that I pose here wouldn’t fix everything, by any stretch of the imagination; but they would, at least (I hope), mitigate some of the issues that I’ve outlined over the course of this essay. And one way or another, I hope that they’ll help to demonstrate that Dani’s self-sacrificial death was completely unnecessary. (Seriously, just not including Dani’s death would’ve enabled the show to completely dodge the question of Bury Your Gays and would’ve otherwise gone a long way towards avoiding the problems with the show’s queer representation).

So, here's how this is going to work. First, I’m going to pose a few general, guiding questions before then proposing an overarching thematic modification that expands on an idea that’s already prominent across the show. This will then serve as the groundwork for two alternative scenarios. I’m not going to go super into detail with either of these alternatives; mostly, I just want to demonstrate that the show that could’ve easily replaced the situation leading to Dani drowning herself. (For the record, I also think that the show could’ve benefitted from having at least one additional episode—and from some timing and pacing restructuring otherwise. So, before anybody tries an excuse like “but this wouldn’t fit into the last episode,” I want to urge that we imagine these possibilities beyond that limitation).

Let’s start off by returning to a point that I raised in the earlier conversation about grief and acceptance: the trickiness of Viola’s “acceptance.”

What Viola “accepts” in the end aren’t her losses or her own mortality, but Dani’s desperate, last-ditch-effort invitation to inhabit her. Within the show’s extant ending, Viola never actually comes to any kind of acceptance otherwise. Dani’s suicide effectively forces her dissolution, eradicating her persistent presence through the redemptive power of self-sacrifice. But in all of my viewings of the show and in all of my efforts to think through and write about it, there’s a question that’s been bugging me to no end: Why does Viola accept Dani’s invitation in the first place?

We know that Peter figured out the “it’s you, it’s me, it’s us” trick in his desperation to return to some form of life and to leave the grounds of Bly Manor. But…what is the appeal of it for Viola? How do her own motivations factor into it? For so long, Viola’s soul has been tenaciously persisting at Bly all so that she can repeatedly return to the physical locus of her connection with her husband and daughter, their shared bedroom in the manor. She’s done this for so long that she no longer even remembers why she’s doing it—she just goes back there to grab whatever child she can find and strangles whoever happens to get in her way. So what would compel her to accept Dani’s invitation? What does she get out of it—and what does she want out of it? What does her acceptance mean? And why, then, does her acceptance result in the dissipation of the gravity well?

We can conjecture, certainly. But the show doesn’t actually provide answers to these questions. Indeed, one of the other major criticisms that I have of Bly is that it confines all of Viola’s development to the eighth episode alone. I really think that it needed to have done way more to characterize her threat and at least gestureat her history sooner, rather than leaving it all to that penultimate episode, interrupting and drawing out the exact moment when she’s about to kill Dani. (Like, after centuries of Viola indiscriminately killing people, and with so many ghosts that’ve been loitering around for so long because of that, wouldn’t Bly Manor have rampant ghost stories floating around about it by the time Dani arrives? But there’s only one minor suggestion of that possibility: Henry indicating that he might’ve met a soldier ghost once. That’s it. And on that note, all of the ghosts at the manor needed to have had more screentime and development, really). Further, it’s disappointing that the show devotes that entire eighth episode to accounting for Viola’s motivations, only to then reduce her to Big, Bad, Unspeakable Evil in the final episode, with no rhyme or reason for what she’s doing, all so that she can necessitate Dani’s death.

As we continue pondering these unanswered questions, there’s also another issue that I want to raise, which the show abandons only as an oblique, obscure consideration. And that is: How the hell did Jamie acquire all that extensive knowledge about Viola, the ghosts of the manor, and all that happened, such that she is able to tell Bly’sstory in such rich detail? My own sort of headcanon answer to this is that Viola’s possession of Dani somehow enabled Viola to regain some of her own memories—as well as, perhaps, a more extended, yet also limited awareness of the enduring consciousnesses of the other ghosts—while also, in turn, giving Dani access to them, too. Dani then could have divulged what she learned to Jamie, which would account for how Jamie knows so much. I bring this up because it provides one possible response to the question of “What does Viola get out of her possession of Dani?” (especially given the significant weight that the show places on the retention of one’s memories—more on this in a moment) and because this is an important basis for both of my proposed alternative scenarios.

Before we dig into those alternative scenarios, however, there’s also a thematic modification that I want to suggest, which would help to provide another answer to “What does Viola get out of her possession of Dani?” while also alleviating the issues that lead into the valorization of Dani’s suicide. That thematic modification involves how the show defines love. Although Bly’s sustained contrasts between love and possession have some valuable elements, I think that the ending would’ve benefitted from downplaying the love vs. possession theme (which is where we run into so much trouble with Dani’s self-sacrifice, and which has also resulted in some celebratory conflations between “selflessness” and self-sacrifice that I’ve seen crop up in commentary about the show—but, y’all, self-sacrifice is not something to celebrate in romantic partnerships, so please, please be careful idolizing that) to instead play up a different theme: the idea that love is the experience of feeling such safety and security with another person that we can find opportunities for peace by being with them.

Seeking peace—and people with whom to feel safe enough to share traumas and experience peace—is a theme that already runs rampant across the show, so this modification is really just a matter of accentuating it differently. It’s also closely linked to the moving through grief theme that we’ve already discussed at length, as numerous characters in Bly express desires for solitude with loved ones as a way of finding relief and healing from their pain, grief, and trauma. (And I suspect that I latched onto this because I have desperately wanted peace, calm, and stillness in the midst of my own acute, compounding traumas…and because my own former romantic partner was obviously not someone with whom I felt safe enough to experience the kind of peace that would’ve allowed me to begin the process of healing).

We run into this idea early in the development of Jamie and Dani’s romance, as narrator Jamie explains in the scene leading up to their first kiss, “The au pair was tired. She’d been tired for so long. Yet without even realizing she was doing it, she found herself taking her own advice that she’d given to Miles. She’d chosen someone to keep close to her that she could feel tired around.” Following this moment, at the beginning of Episode 5, narrator Jamie then foregrounds Hannah’s search for peace (“The housekeeper knew, more than most, that deep experience was never peaceful. And because she knew this ever since she’d first called Bly home, she would always find her way back to peace within her daily routine, and it had always worked”), which calls our attention to the ways that Hannah has been retreating into her memory of her first meeting with Owen as a crucial site of peace against the shock of her own death. Grown-up Flora even gushes about “that easy silence you only get with your forever person who loves you as much as you love them” when she’s getting all teary at Jamie about her husband-to-be.

Of course, this theme is already actively at work in the show’s conclusion as well. During her “beast in the jungle” monologue, Dani tells Jamie that she feels Viola “in here. It’s so quiet…it’s so quiet. She’s in here. And this part of her that’s in here, it isn’t…peaceful.” As such, Viola’s whole entire issue is that, after all those centuries, she has not only refused to accept her own death, but she’s likewise never been at peace—she’s still not at peace. Against Viola’s unpeaceful presence, however, Dani does find peace in her life with Jamie…at least temporarily, until Viola’s continued refusal of peace leads to Dani’s self-destructive sense of fatalism. Still, in her replacement of Viola as the new Lady of the Lake, Dani exists as a prevailing force of peace (she’s “harmless as a dove”); however, incidentally, she only accomplishes this through the decidedly non-peaceful, violent act of taking her own life.

But…what if that hadn’t been the case?

What if, instead, the peace that Dani finds in her beautiful, queer, non-self-sacrificing existence with Jamie had also enabled Viola to find some sense of peace of her own? What if, through her inhabitation of Dani, Viola managed to, like…calm the fuck down some? What if Dani’s safety and solitude worked to at least somewhat assuage Viola’s rage—and even guide her towards some other form of acceptance?

Depending on how this developed, the show could’ve borne out the potential for a much more subversive conclusion than what we actually got. Rather than All-Consuming-Evil Viola’s forced dissolution through the violence of Dani’s redemptive self-sacrifice (and its attendant recuperation of heteronormativity), we could’ve instead had the makings of a narrative about sapphic love as a source of healing that’s capable of breaking cycles of violence and trauma. And I think that it would’ve been possible for the show to accomplish this without a purely “happy” ending in which everything was just magically fine, and all the trauma dissipated, and there were no problems in the world ever again. The show could have, in fact, managed this while preserving the allegorical possibilities of Viola’s presence as mental and/or terminal illness.

But, before I can start describing how this could’ve happened, there’s one last little outstanding problem that I need to address. In the video essay that I cited earlier, Rowan Ellis suggests that there are limitations to the “Viola as a stand-in for mental/terminal illness” reading of the show because of the fact that Dani invites Viola into herself and, therefore, willingly brings on her own suffering. But I don’t think that this is quite the case or that it interferes with these allegorical readings. As I’ve already mentioned at various points, Dani doesn’t entirely understand the implications of what she’s doing when she issues her invitation to Viola; and even so, the invitation is still a matter of a dubious consent that evidently cannot be withdrawn once initially granted—at the absolute most generous characterization. Dani’s invitation is a snap decision, a frantic attempt to save Flora after everyone and everything else has failed. Consequently, we don’t necessarily have to construe Viola’s presence in Dani’s life as a matter of Dani “willingly inviting her own suffering,” but can instead understand it as the wounds and traumas that persist after Dani has risked her life to rescue Flora. In this way, the show could have also challenged the traditional heroic-redemptive narrative formula by offering a more explicit commentary on the all-too-often unseen ramifications of selflessly “heroic” actions (instead of just heedlessly perpetuating their glorification and, with them, self-sacrifice). Dani may have saved Flora—but at what cost to herself? What long-term toll might this lasting trauma exact on her?

And with that, we move into my two alternative ending scenarios.

Alternative Ending 1: Progressive Memory Loss

Memory and its loss are such significant themes in Bly Manor that theycould use an essay all their own.

I am, however, going to refrain from writing such an essay at this moment in time (I’m already super tired from writing this one, lol).

Still, the first of my alternative scenarios would bring these major themes full-circle—and would make Jamie eat her words.

In this alternative scenario, Viola would find some sense of peace—even if fraught and, at times, tumultuous—in her possession of Dani. As her rage subsides, she is even able to regain fragmented pieces of her own memory, which Dani is also able to experience. The restoration of Viola’s memory, albeit vague and scattered, leads Dani to try to learn even more about Viola’s history at Bly in an effort to at least partially fill in the gaps. As time goes on, though, Viola’s co-habitation within Dani’s consciousness leads to the steady degradation of Dani’s own memory. The reclamation of Viola’s memories would occur, then, concomitant with a steady erosion of both herself and Dani. Thus, Dani would still undergo an inexorable decline across the show’s ending, but one more explicitly akin to degenerative neurological diseases associated with aging, accentuating the “Viola as terminal illness” allegory while also still carrying resonances of the residual reverberations of trauma (given that memory loss is often a common consequence of acute trauma). Jamie would take on the role of Dani’s caregiver, mirroring and more directly illuminating the role that Owen plays for his mother earlier in the show. By the show’s conclusion, Dani would still be alive, including during the course of the frame narrative.

I mentioned earlier in this essay that I’ve endured even more trauma and grief since my brother’s death and since my breakup with my ex-fiancé. So, I’ll share another piece of it with you now: shortly after my breakup, my dad was diagnosed with one of those degenerative neurological diseases that I listed way back at the very beginning. I moved home not only to get away from my ex, but also to become a caregiver. In the time that I’ve been home, I’ve had no choice but to behold my dad’s continuous, irreversible decline and his indescribable suffering. He has further health issues, including a form of cancer. As a result, he now harbors a sense of fatalism that he’ll never be able to reconcile—he does not have the cognitive capacities to address his despair or turn it into some other form of acceptance. He is merely, in essence, awaiting his death. Hence, fatalism is something that I have had to “accept” as a regular component of my own life. (In light of this situation, you may be wondering if I have thoughts and opinions on medical aid in dying, given all that I have had to say so far about fatalism and suicide. And the answer is yes, I do have thoughts and opinions…but they are complex, and I don’t really want to try to account for them here).

Indeed, I live in a suspended, indefinite state of grieving. Day in and day out, I watch my father perish before my eyes, anticipating the blow of fresh grief that will strike when he dies. I watch my mother’s grief. I watch my father’s grief. He forgets about the symptoms of his disease; he looks up his disease to try to learn about it; he re-discovers his inevitable demise anew; the grieving process restarts again. (“She would wake, she would walk, she would forget […] and she would fade and fade and fade”).

What, then, does acceptance look like when grief is so ongoing and so protracted?

What does acceptance look like in the absence of any possibility of acceptance?

Kübler-Ross’s “five stages of grief” model has been a meaningful guide for countless folks in their efforts to navigate grief and loss. Yet, the model has also been subject to a great deal of critique. Critics have accused the model of, among other things, suggesting that grieving is a linear process, whereby a person moves from one stage to the next and then ends conclusively at acceptance (when grieving is, in fact, an incredibly uneven, nonlinear, and inconclusive process). Relatedly, they have also called attention to the fact that the model commonly gets used prescriptively in ways that usher grieving folks towards the end goal of acceptance and cast judgment on those who do not reach that stage. These are criticisms that I would level at Bly’s application of Kübler-Ross as well. Earlier, we thoroughly covered the show’sissues with grief and acceptance as major themes; but in addition to those issues, Bly alsotends to steer its characters towards abrupt endpoints of acceptance, while doling out punishments to those who “refuse” to accept. At root, there are normative ascriptions at work in the show’s very characterization of deferred acceptance as refusal and acceptance itself as an active choice that one has to make.

This alternative ending, then, would have the potential to challenge and complicate the show’s handling of grief by approaching Jamie’s grieving and Dani’s fatalism from very different angles. As Dani’s caregiver, Jamie would encounter and negotiate grief in ongoing and processual ways, which would continue to evolve as her wife’s condition worsens and her caregiving responsibilities mount, thereby lending new layers of meaning to the message that “To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them.” Dani’s fatalism here could also serve as a different interpretation of James’s Beast in the Jungle; perhaps her sense of fatalism ebbs and flows, morphs and contorts along with the progression of her memory loss as she anticipates the gradual whittling-away of her selfhood—or even forgets that inevitability entirely. Still a tragic, heart-rending ending to the show, this scenario may not have the dramatic force of Jamie screaming into the waters of the lake, but it would be a relatable depiction of the ways that many real-life romances conclude. (And, having witnessed the extent of my mom’s ongoing caregiving for my dad, lemme tell ya: if y’all really want a portrayal of selflessness in romantic partnerships, I can think of nothing more selfless than caring for one’s terminally ill partner across their gradual death).

Additionally, this scenario could allow the show to maintain the frame narrative, while also packing fresh complexities into it.

Perhaps, in this case, Dani is still alive, but Jamie has come to Flora’s wedding alone, leaving Dani with in-home caregivers or within assisted living or some such. She comes there determined to ensure that Miles and Flora regain at least some awareness of what Dani did for them—that they remember her. The act of telling Dani’s story, then, becomes not only the performance of a mourning ritual, but also a vital way of preserving and perpetuating Dani’s memory where both the children and Dani, herself, can no longer remember. To be sure, such purposes already compel Jamie’s storytelling in the show: Narrator Jamie indicates that the new Lady of the Lake will eventually lose her recollection of the life she had with the gardener, “leaving the only trace of who she once was in the memory of the woman who loved her most.” But in the context of a conclusion so focused on memory loss, this statement would take on new dimensions of import. In this way, the frame narrative might also more forcefully prompt us, the audience, to reflect on the waysthat we can carry on the memories of our loved ones by telling their stories—and also, maybe, the responsibilities that we may have to do so. “Almost no one even remembers how she was when her mind hadn’t gone,” Jamie remarks after returning from Owen’s mother’s funeral, a subtle indictment of just how easily we can lose our own memories of those who suffer from conditions like dementia—how easily we can fail to carry on the stories of the people they were before and to keep their memories alive. (“We are all just stories in the end,” Olivia Crain emphasizes during the eulogy for Shirl’s kitten in The Haunting of Hill House. In fact, there’re some interesting comparative analyses we could do about storytelling and the responsibilities incumbent on storytellers between these two Flanagan shows).

Along those lines, I think that this would’ve been an excellent opportunity for the show to exacerbate and foreground those latent tensions between Jamie and Owen (and maybe also Henry) about whether to share Dani’s story with the now-adult children.

In the show’s explorations of memory loss, there’re already some interesting but largely neglected undercurrents churning around about the idea that maybe losing one’s memory isn’t just a curse or a heartbreaking misfortune (as it is for Viola, the ghosts of Bly Manor, and Owen’s mother), but can, in certain circumstances, be a blessing. Bly implies—via Owen and the frame narrative—that Miles and Flora have been able to flourish in their lives because they have forgotten what happened at Bly and still remain blissfully unaware of it…which, to be clear, is only possible because of the sacrifices that Dani and Jamie have made. But this situation raises, and leaves floating there, a bunch of questions about the responsibilities we have to impart traumatic histories to younger generations—whether interpersonally (e.g. within families) or societally (e.g. in history classrooms). Cycles of trauma don’t end by shielding younger generations from the past; they especially don’t end by forcing impacted, oppressed, traumatized populations (e.g. queer folks) to shoulder the burdens of trauma on their own for the sake of protecting another population’s innocent ignorance. But how do we impart traumatic histories? How do we do so responsibly, compassionately, in ways that respect those harrowing pasts—and those who lived them, those most directly impacted by them—without actively causing harm to receiving audiences? On the other hand, if we over-privilege the innocence of those who have forgotten or those who weren’t directly impacted, what do we lose and what do we risk by not having frank, open conversations about traumatic histories?

As it stands, I think that Bly is remiss in the way it tosses out these issues, but never actually does anything with them. It could have done much, much more. In this alternate ending, then, there could be some productive disagreement among Jamie, Owen, and Henry about whether to tell Flora and Miles, what to tell them, how to tell them. Perhaps, in her seizing of the conversation and her launching of the story in such a public way, Jamie has taken matters into her own hands and has done so in a way that Owen and Henry can’t easily derail. Perhaps Owen sympathizes but does, indeed, abruptly cut her off just before her audience can completely connect the dots. Perhaps Henry is conflicted and doesn’t take a stand—or perhaps he does. Perhaps we find out that Henry had been torn about whether to even invite Jamie because of the possibility of something like this happening. Or, perhaps Henry wants the children to know and believes that they should hear Dani’s story from Jamie. Perhaps we see scenes of past quarrels between Jamie and Owen, Owen and Henry. Perhaps, once the story has ended, we see a brief aftermath conversation between Owen and Jamie about what Jamie has done, their speculations about how it may impact Miles and Flora. Perhaps the show presents these conversations in ways that challenge us to reflect on them, even if it does not provide conclusive answers to the questions it raises, and even if it leaves these conflicts open-ended, largely unresolved.

Alternative Ending 2: Living with the Trauma

If Bly’s creators had wanted Viola’s inhabitation of Dani to represent the ongoing struggles of living—and loving someone—with severe mental illness and trauma, they could have also just…done that? Like, they could have just portrayed Jamie and Dani living their lives together and dealing with Viola along the way. They could have just let that be it. It wouldn’t have been necessary to include Dani’s death within the show’s depicted timeline at all.

The show could’ve more closely aligned its treatment of Dani’s fatalism with James’s Beast in the Jungle—but with, perhaps, a bit more of a hopeful spin. Perhaps, early on, Dani is convinced that her demise is imminent and incontrovertible, much as we already see in the final episode’s diner scene. For a while, this outlook continues to dominate her existence in ways that interfere with her daily functioning and her relationship with Jamie. Perhaps there’s an equivalent of the flooded bathtub scene, but it happens much earlier in the progression of their partnership: Dani despairs, and Jamie is there to reinforce her commitment to staying with Dani through it all, much like her extant “If you can’t feel anything, then I’ll feel everything for the both of us” remarks. But maybe, as a result of this, Dani comes to a realization much like The Beast in the Jungle’s John Marcher—but one that enables her to act on her newfound understanding, an opportunity that Marcher never finds before it’s too late. Maybe she realizes that her fatalism has been causing her to miss out on really, truly embracing the life that she and Jamie have been forging together, thus echoing the show’s earlier points about how unresolved trauma can impede our cultivation of meaningful relationships. Maybe she realizes that her life with Jamie has been passing her by while she’s remained so convinced that Viola will claim that life at any moment. Maybe she comes to understand that her perpetual sense of dread has been hurting Jamie—that Jamie needs her in the same ways that she needs Jamie, but that Dani’s ever-present sense of doom has been preventing her from providing for those needs. And maybe this leads to a re-framing of the “you, me, us,” conceit, with a scene in which Dani acknowledges the extent to which her fatalism has been dictating their lives; in light of this acknowledgement, she and Jamie resolve—together—to continue supporting each other as they navigate Viola’s lasting influences on their lives.

By making this suggestion, I once again do not want to seem like I’m advocating that “Dani should fight back against Viola” (or, in other words, that “Dani should fight harder to win the battle against her mental illness”). But I do want to direct us back to a point that I raised at the very beginning: grieving, traumatized, and mentally ill folks can, indeed, cause harm to our loved ones. Our grief, trauma, and mental illness don’t excuse that fact. But what that means is that we have to take responsibility for our harmful actions. What it absolutely does not mean is that our harms are inevitable or that our loved ones would be better off without us.It means recognizing that we still matter and have value to others, despite the narratives we craft to try to convince ourselves otherwise. It means acknowledging the wounds that fatalistic, “everybody is better without me” assumptions can inflict. It means identifying the ways that we can support and care for our loved ones, even through our own struggles with our mental health.

“Fighting harder to win the battle against mental illness” is a callous and downright incorrect framing of the matter; but there are, nevertheless, intentional steps that we must take to heal from trauma, to receive treatment for our mental illnesses, to care for ourselves, to care for our loved ones. For instance…the very process of writing this essay incited me to do a lot of reflecting on the self-defeating narratives that I have been telling myself about my mental health and my relationships with others. And that, in turn, incited me to do some course-correcting. I thought about how much I want to work towards healing, however convoluted and intricate that process may be. I thought about how I want to support my family. How I want to foster a robust social support network, such that I feel a genuine sense of community. How I want to be an attentive friend. How, someday, if I’m fortunate enough to have a girlfriend, I want to be a caring, present, and equal partner to her; I want to emotionally nourish her through life’s trials and turmoil, not just expect her to provide that emotional nourishment for me. I started writing this essay in August; and since then, because of it, I’ve held myself accountable by reaching out to friends, spending time with them, trying to support them. I’ve also managed to get myself, finally, to start therapy. And my therapist is already helping me address those self-defeating narratives that have led me to believe that I’m just a burden on my friends. So, y’know, I’m workin’ on it.

But it ain’t pretty. And it also ain’t a linear upward trajectory of consistent improvement. It’s messy. Sometimes, frankly, it’s real ugly.

It could be for Dani, too.

Even with her decision to accept the certainties and uncertainties of Viola’s intrusive presence in her life, to live her life as best she can in the face of it all, perhaps Dani still struggles from day to day. Perhaps some days are better than others. Perhaps Viola, as I suggested earlier, begins finding some modicum of peace through her possession of Dani; nonetheless, her rage and disquiet never entirely subside, and they still periodically overtake Dani. Perhaps Dani improves, only to then backslide, only to then find ways to stabilize once again. In this way, the show could’ve more precisely portrayed the muddled, tumultuous lastingness of grief and trauma throughout a lifetime—without concluding that struggle with a valorized suicide.

Such portrayals are not unprecedented in horror. As I contemplated this ending possibility, I couldn’t help but think of The Babadook (2014), another piece of horror media whose monster carries allegorical import as a representation of the endurance and obtrusion of unresolved trauma. The titular monster doesn’t disappear at the film’s end; Sam emphasizes, in fact, that “you can’t get rid of the Babadook.” And so, even after Amelia has confronted the Babadook and locked him in the basement of the family’s home, he continues to lurk there, still aggressive and threatening to overcome her, but able to be pacified with a bowlful of worms. Like loss and trauma, the Babadook can never be totally ignored or dispelled, only assuaged with necessary, recurrent attention and feedings.

Bly could have easily done something similar with Viola. Perhaps, in the same way that Amelia has to regularly provide the Babadook with an offering of worms, Dani must also “feed” Viola to soothe her rage. What might those feedings look like? What might they consist of? Perhaps Viola draws Dani back to Bly Manor, insisting on revisiting those same sites that have held implacable sway over her for centuries. Perhaps these visits are what permit Dani to gradually learn about Viola: who she was, what she has become, why she has tarried between life and death for so long. Perhaps Dani also learns that these “feedings” agitate Viola for a while, stirring her into fresh furor—but that, in their wake, Viola also settles more deeply and for longer periods. Perhaps they necessitate that Dani and Jamie both directly confront their own traumas, bring them to the surface, attend to them. Perhaps, together, they learn how to navigate their traumas in productive, mutually supportive ways. Perhaps this is also what quiets Viola over time, even if Dani is never quite sure whether Viola will return to claim her life.

You may be wondering, then, about what happens with the frame narrative in this scenario. If Dani doesn’t meet some tragic demise, what happens to the role and significance of grieving in the act of Jamie’s storytelling? Would Jamie’s storytelling even occur? Wouldn’t Dani just be at Flora’s wedding, too? Would we miss the emotional gut-punch of the reveal of the narrator’s identity at the end?  

Perhaps, in this case, the ending removes some of the weight off of the grief theme to instead foreground those troubled deliberations about how to impart traumatic histories (as we covered in the previous scenario). As such, the frame could feature those conflicts between Jamie (and Dani here too this time), Owen, and Henry concerning whether or not to tell Dani’s story to Miles and Flora. Perhaps Dani decides not to attend the wedding, wary of contributing to this conflict at the scene of what should be a joyous occasion for Flora; perhaps she feels like she can’t even face the children. And then, without Dani there, perhaps an overwrought Jamie jumps into the story when the opportunity presents itself—whether impulsively or premeditatedly.

Or…Perhaps the show could’ve just scrapped the frame at Flora’s wedding and could’ve done something else instead. What might that be? I have no idea! Sky’s the limit.

At any rate, even with these changes, it would’ve still been possible to have the show conclude in a sentimental, tear-jerking way (which seems to be Flanagan’s preference). Perhaps Jamie’s storytelling does spark the return of the children’s memories. Perhaps, as they begin to remember, they reach out to Dani and Jamie, wanting to connect with them, wanting especially to see Dani again. And then, perhaps, the show could’ve ended with a scene of Miles and Flora finally reuniting with Dani—emotional, sweet, and memorable, no valorized suicide or exploitation of queer tragedy needed.

Conclusion

In my writing of this essay—and over the course of the Bly Manor and Hill House rewatches that it inspired—I’ve been finding myself also doing a great deal of reflection about the possibilities and purposes of horror media. I’ve been thinking, in particular, about the potential for the horror genre to provide contained settings in which we can face and explore our deepest fears and traumas in (relatively) safe, controlled ways. Honestly, I think that this is part of why I enjoy Flanagan’s work so much (even if it also enrages me at the same time). If you’ve read this far, you’ll have seen just how profoundly I relate to so much of the subject matter of The Haunting of Bly Manor. It has been extremely meaningful and valuable for me to encounter the show’s depictions of topics like familial trauma, grief, loss, compulsory heterosexuality, caregiving for aging parents, so on, all of which bear so heavily on my own existence. Bly Manor produced opportunities for me to excavate and dig deeply into the worst experiences of and feelings about my life: to look at them, understand them, and give voice to them, when I’m otherwise inclined to bury them into inconspicuous docility.

Even so, the show does not handle these relatable topics as well as it could have. Flanagan and the many contributors to this horror anthology can’t just preach at us about the responsibilities of storytellers; they, too, have responsibilities as storytellers in the communication of these delicate, sensitive, weighty human experiences. And so, to reinforce a point that I made earlier, this is why I’ve written this extensive critique. It’s not because I revile the show and want to condemn it—it’s because I cherish Bly Manor immensely. It’s because I wanted more out of it. It’s because I want to hold it and its creators accountable. It’s because I want folks to think more critically about it (especially after how close I came to unreflectively accepting its messages in my own initial reception of it).

Television usually doesn’t get me this way. It’s been a long time since I was this emotionally attached to a show. So this essay has been my attempt to honor Bly with a careful, meticulous treatment. I appreciate all of the reflection and self-work that it has inspired me to undertake. I’ve wanted to pay my respects in the best way I know how: with close, thorough analysis.

If you’ve read all this mess, thanks for taking the time to do so. I hope that you’ve been able to get something out of it, too.

Representation matters, y’all.

The end.

[opensesamepandemonium]

#2 (tied)

Fyodor Dostoevsky / Nikolai Gogol - Bungo Stray Dogs

I know I've done my top #10 ships, but TO BE FAIR, I did the list before I finished watching the Decay of Angel's arc so I wasn't privvy to the absolute brain rot of the ship that is: Fyolai.

Starting off with my strongest canon point: Nikolai harbours big big feelings for his Dos-kun. Evidenced by literally all his interactions with Fyodor, how he talks about him to other people, and the actions of LITERALLY HOLDING THE HANDS OF DEATH to express his intimacy.

Speaking of intimacy... Nikolai refers to Fyodor as his 'intimate friend', I mean... c'mon now...if it quacks like a duck..

With how fractured Nikolai's psyche is, it seems logical that he wouldn't be able to experience things like love the same way a normal person would. All he understands is that Fyodor has (probably knowingly) infested Nikolai's brain with intimate emotions, thus tethering the bird to the rat. Naturally, in true Nikolai fashion, this must mean that he needs to kill Fyodor, thus cutting free from that tether.

However, when Fyodor dies at the conclusion of his Meursault game, Nikolai is immediately grieving. Even Dazai is like, "imma let this be" because he recognises that Nikolai is mourning the loss of someone important to him. ALL WHILST HOLDING THE ARM TO HIS HEART AND FACE I MEAN HONESTLY NOW.

As for our rat king, I similiarly believe that he doesn't understand the feelings of love as everything this man does is carefully calculated by that big greasy analytical head of his, leaving no room for emotions.

Saying that though, he canonically demonstrates a fondness for Nikolai. Even when the clown disobeys his plan with the chainsaw cutty-cut, he's pleased to see him in Meursault, and doesn't even question how he's alive (almost like he predicted that Nikolai wouldn't actually follow through with his self-sacrifice, which y'know, he probably did).

Essentially I think that Fyodor has as much feelings for Nikolai as he is capable of. It's easier for them to continue their games of wanting to kill one another than to be vunerable and say "hey, you are my world."

Finally - THE OFFICIAL ART (this one too) seriously, I don't know how they expect us to believe this is a platonic partnership jfc.

I'm sorry this was so long, I just have a lot of feelings and they are two entirely too complex characters to briefly summarise.

Art by: creantzy (who carries the Fyolai fandom, and if you haven't seen their animation to 'Bernadette' you absolutely must)

[pain-is-too-tired]

Chat. Thinking about Jake Mason again.

Like,he was 100% depressed in TLH. Right?

And if I have to think about all this stuff I'm taking y'all down with me jdfdjc

TW FOR TALK OF DEPRESSION AND SOME TALK OF SUICIDEAL IDEATION

But yeah. His introduction is so interesting to me because not only is this poor boy in a full body cast, he's dealing with multiple injuries to his siblings,as well as still worrying about a dragon in the forest that literally put him in the cast to begin with.

And there's a chance that a lot of new kids joined the cabin after BoM. Harley is,what? 7-8? He's a LIL KID. A age of a typical 2-3rd grader. Along with all the other likely mostly 10-15 year olds,he having to take care of a lot all at once,after a war,and after loosing his big brother.

And,for fellow Sunforge shippers,after loosing his boyf too.

Like,I don't think we talk enough about that. He's taking care of a 7-8 year old. Why likely still actively mourning those he lost. Why dealing with all these incidents and then getting so badly hurt that he's in a BODY CAST

By the time Leo meets him he seems so...done? Like just indifferent to everything.

"I'm you Head Counselor...for now."

I honestly don't think he was meaning stepping down. Sure,he DOES step down later, but if he wanted to step down at that point,why not just do it then? I doubt he was just waiting for the right person to take the mantle. Plus, he was stuck in bed. He couldn't do much anyway so why not switch then?

He nearly died from Festus before, I'm sure he was highly aware they something could happen to him that could kill him. And,like I seen mentioned before,there's a chance he wouldn't be too against Festus having managed to kill him.

I don't think he was actively suicidal,but i think he was at least passively so.

He just lost most of the stability he likely had. He doesn't really have anyone to lean on, and he was never given time to grieve. He was trusted into leader ship.

Not just that,like I mentioned before, he has to deal with the fact that Silena,his brother's girlfriend, had been the spy. One the reasons for his death. And has to deal with people around camp calling her a hero for her sacrifice. Obviously I'm sure Beckendorf is talked about, but that still hard to process. Especially knowing how close they were as partners.

No wonder he's so apathic by time Leo meets him. Everything's falling apart around him, he's nearly died multiple times in just the pass year,he's lost multiple people he's loved and cared about,he's dealt with the betrayal of someone he likely strongly trusted.

Especially for a Neuroduvergent teen boy, that's a lot to process.

We've had some representation of depression in the series, but idk, something about that one scene hits different for me.

He's just so indifferent and defeated. And he's seems like one the only Head Counselors we truly see like that.

Drew is snappy and dismissive

Will forces a chill and sunny attitude

The Stolls as usual being pranksters and joking around to cope.

Clarisse seems her usual self

Yet,in TLH,Jake is just...defeated. but in TLO and later BOO, he's chill but determined. He's a strategist,he finds some humor in Michael and Clarisse argument and makes a dig at Octavian during the BOO meeting (i just know he's thinking that Michael would kick Octavian's ass-)

So when you read him in TLH it's just...it's a clear difference and hits so much harder.

Kinda wished instead of Leo becoming head counselor, we see him being there helps Jake get back to who he was before. He leads the cabin why Leo's gone anyway. I think it would've been sweet to have that close connection between them.

I also hc that Jake had started to withdrew from most of the other HCs. Except for Will,who was dealing with the Hephaestus cabin cause of the injuries.

That's partly why Will was asked to take Leo to Cabin 9.he was the only one who probably knew how to handle Jake's state in a even way.

Anyway. Jake Mason my beloved. You deserved more scenes.

[edwardsissyhandsthtdanceslikeabb]

Blink Twice is an encapsulation of dubiousness to me, not only in the thinking it inspires, but in the layers you’re left grappling with, and then the inferences one has to resonate with after that.

and nothing evidences that more than the intangible nature of the disturbing angle to me, as its muddied in the layers of complication and nuance that lurk beneath. i mean the movie itself paints over the tragedies with cynicism, is entirely dedicated to weaponizing intuition and comfort against you.

i’d never read it as disturbed, and it too, never lets you mourn in turn. bc its insane at its inception, warped by frida’s fanatical infatuation with slater, bordering preying, a reverence for one's kill. and lures us with psychedelic, sugary visuals, with the indulgence – on food, luxury, substances. on billionaire brainrot fodder, perpetuating their power, craving proximity. inviting it into our homes, our heads. the movie *wants* you, most of all, to understand frida’s hunger. and its that thirst i most resonate with, not for a lack of empathy, or even technical prowess, but the basal intrigue it cemented in me instead.

bc it’s a movie that’s nearly primal for me. it scents cycles and desensitization, roles and autonomy, a self-infliction of decay, and disorients you before you’re allowed a proper lungful. there are only questions. shifts. a russian doll of detail and poison, and the inviolability that invoked, ironically only ever paralyzed my thinking, serving creative rot, over any epiphanies or nuance i could hope to be enlightened to.

the animalistic cruelty of desire is not there to be contextualized, but understood. felt. a relationship as inextricable as frida and slater’s. with slater likely parasitizing her algorithm, wielding his techbro power to further entrap her. like how we routinely indulge in the same. you rewind the movie, and pick out signs of danger, slater snickering at frida praising her memory, the supposed water he drinks and its snake-venom hue, the recurring jingling of a necklace, and like frida, have the fantasy demystified, wonder how there was *ever* an illusion of safety.

so watching an analysis video which posits that slater smokes the venom, that he indulges all suffering except his own, just as frida remembers the doctor’s blinks of warning, while burying the suffering they foresee, that they have seen, is watching frida emulate slater, and slater her.

it’s the movie’s thesis statement: there is no healing, there is no forgiveness, only embrace, only numbness, apathy. and when a stray tear glistens on slater’s face, he mourns not for the men, for paternalistic, patriarchal dominance, but for his friend. the only one he claims. he mourns their intimacy, their unity — grieves the good time™. a good time unattainable within trauma, within memory.

yet this pleasure, love, are perverted into captivity, and all i ended up thinking of was: “i love you means you’re never ever, ever getting rid of me.” that slater thinks he knows best, thinks he’s doing good by unburdening her, yet scars her all the same.

as bodies are made immaterial to him, dispossessed of sanctity or autonomy and so their desecration harmless. as slater makes frida a conduit for physical harm while lavishing her emotionally, and yet also exploiting their bond, feeding on their closeness for the labor of love and pain it provides. bc the one thing he needs, the one thing he cannot sacrifice, is her closeness, her intimacy, as it validates his ethos of forgetfulness, reflects it back at him. thusly, frida is reduced to a vessel of experience just as he was, just as he reduces himself to, oversaturated in good times™.

good times masquerading as truth, which slater exposes a latent contempt for, as he emasculates the remaining boy for his cowardice, his complacency, despite his glaringly disoriented, unaware state. regardless of any violation he too may have suffered, when we’d seen him scooting away from another man on the ground, enfeebled and vulnerated. in spite of slater’s aggrievement by his own lapses in memory, his own embracing of that which violated him, and violated also, those he cares abt. but slater is relieved of any loneliness by this flagelattory camaraderie, of the perpetual loss of significance, when frida remains a fixture in his suffering, when she constantly violates her boundaries too.

and we too strain our boundaries, test our empathy with the narratives we are inclined to accept. frida the girlboss or frida the fallen angel? akin to the tests slater sets for her, handing her clarity just to see what she dares remember. the good time™, the willing participant, the indulged, or the languished? seeing if she’s really forgiven, or rather, forgotten instead, drawn to indulgence despite how its hurt her. when she endangers jess in turn, desperate to feel valued, to *feel* power — in it all, is the powerstruggle.

and yet, also a relationship, as jess protects frida despite it all, and frida wakes up to the deception bc of her love for jess. while the island, the staff, embrace frida as if she has always been, will find her way around just as she will find a way to enlightenment, handed venom as if it were benign, as if the island itself wanted her freed. pests, predators, turned to salvation, just as poison becomes a cure. the cure. and when the island has been said to be the garden of eden, enlightenment is truly then, the original sin. the genesis of awareness.

and thusly, frida reclaims power by hurting him, fed his own poison. frida now the snake, frida refusing to leave the island still. denied healing, alienated from it, and so stuck still. bound. bound too, as we watched them enjoy every intimacy except the physical, sharing the pain and trauma they’d been subjected to with a nearly ironic a-sexuality, transcendent of it. with slater seeing her as his best friend. exempt from death and equally so from release.

and that twisted, appropriative bond, the repurposing of trauma, and so feeling a sick sense of ownership over it, love for it, are equally present in frida keeping him from death.

her newfound, bleach white luxury, the disappearing stains and panopticon of elitism, are not horrific until they are, and you either embrace it, or you let it hurt. and frida, red rabbit running, red rabbit caught in slater’s sick, trivializing game, already likened to livestock by her name, decided to become the hunter instead. made high on the chase.

unlike slater who provides and subjects experiences onto others, now there is frida who takes and caters experiences for herself. all congratulatory. all good.

thusly, the movie is the trip, it’s delusion and entanglement and the self-eating snake, and trying to sterilize that is as futile as it is sacrilegious.

[nourrris]

I hate, and love Steve Rogers.

there is no character who's given me as many conflicted feelings as he does, i can't tell if i absolutely hate his guts or adore him helplessly, one side is coming from the fact i love tony stark, and steve rogers is an absolute cunt for the way he's treated him at times (which some instances are understandable, but i still hold civil war against him) and then theres the version of him that i hold so close to my heart, excluding his confident demeanor and severe savior (guilt?) complex, he is still the man who couldnt help himself and risk his life for everybody else, the man who was pushed into a situation so life changing, experiencing the quite literal horrors of the world and humanity, both pre and post serum, he lived a rough life, especially with the timeline he lived in originally, and then the entire ordeal with bucky, the horrifying realization what's happened to one of the closest people in his life, what he's become, and the fact he's alive. (not that he ever got the chance to mourn anyways)

and thats not to talk about how his life was ultimately changed completely within such a small time frame for him, prior the modern years, living through a whole different world, about to sacrifice his life to mankind, then he wakes up 70 years later, the love of his life has aged in a way he didn't get the chance too, the world has became something completely separate to the timeline he lived in, he has to learn new social customs, new ways to adapt to how society exists, how is he meant to grieve or mourn through any of this at all? he had absolutely no time, he was consistently put into the highest of stress situations.

i hate how civil war went down, he gave away his life he had began building, of course there were multiple different ways to act and he definitely did not choose the right one, but i'll give the smallest inch of credit and say i'm not sure how i'd act either if i found my best friend (who was supposedly dead, now a deadly assassin) was back in the limelight for the worst reason possible, one that was causing the entire world to hate him, but not only that - his identity of actually still being alive is now public for the entire world to see, even if the man they saw hadn't actually been him.

i can't say i would have taken his side as confidently so brashly, almost killing a person you could almost consider a close friend in defense when they just found your supposedly dead (now assassin) bestfriend is at fault for who killed his parents, tony acting irrationally was rather reasonable, i'd understand bucky defending himself, steve through? i'd say its different, maybe?

he's also rather arrogant in same situations, especially in 'the avengers' when he says 'Big man in a suit of armor, take that away and what are you?' as if tony wasn't the genius behind making every little detail in the suit, constructing it all single handedly, and the prototype that had been created in a very spontaneous manner which still worked miraculously better than any person managed to create in a much larger time frame, and a much less stressful situation.

i cant pretend and believe that steve must know this information of course, they seemed like they had been roughly introduced to eachother, but also to make such a claim against somebody like him who's father was also an insanely credible genius, he should have given him at least some benefit of the doubt, or actually attempted to learn more about him before going straight for eachothers throats like a bunch of kids.

another part of that quote that irked me was the sacrifice one, i frankly do not understand that part, the entire idea of iron-man is one big ol' self sacrifice, there is no safe (or really sane) way to make a machine like that and go into conflict way too big for one person to overtake, he's almost died multiple times for the sake of helping society, the idea of getting his information right isn't even the biggest issue, its that i just genuinely dont understand why he keeps spouting out things with absolutely no context? he says he see's the videos, but its a little hypocritical steve rogers of all people is letting other people define who tony stark is when he lived his entire life being defined what society deems of him just by a single glance, unless of course he just saw one random iron-man video of the stark expo performance with the girls. (which god, i cringed at myself.. why tony, why)

still to act as confident as he did, i would have assumed he attempted to well.. learn more about the guy. i genuinely think this part itself is a poor writing issue though, it felt weirdly out of character, but i can understand it from a certain viewpoint i guess.

once more, another point i wanted to make this time was somewhat against tony's actual response to what steve said, of course in a way hes completely correct where "everything about him came out of a bottle", in a physical sense, but steves over eager need to help was always very evident, his courage in place since the dawn of the world. although, he realistically would likely have never been able to become the man he is without the serum, so well technically theres not much to fight back there, but the serum could have distinctively (and quite literally has) gone to the wrong hands, i'm not sure if i should be applauding him for having morals, but at last, its difficult to say how anybody would react to such a life altering experience, and not really even getting the chance to understand whats happening, or how it works.

i've likely gotten off track, but point is i think he's a very flawed character, but at the same time still one of the kindest people with a heart made out of gold, albeit a bit of a blockhead at times, he truly tries, and he was frankly put in a very unfair position, no matter what he signed up for, there was no world it could have possibly entailed what he's gone through so far, even if he doesn't regret it, or would do it a hundred times more.

anyways, i hate him and love him all the same, and still very strongly hate his ending in endgame (as a total writing issue, i cannot possibly blame the character).

thank you for reading this ramble, so sorry if this upset you, or if i actually got any of the lore wrong, do correct me if i have!

[hxneyfarm]

broken

cw: canon compliant, brief mention of suicidal ideation, discussions of death and grief, and steve's weird relationship with both

something in steve might be broken.

in the years since this whole thing started, he's watched people die. he watched a boy his age be impaled by a monster, heard eddie munson's death rattle with his own two ears. he can easily picture will byers' body being dragged out of the quarry, and he wasn't even there for it. it's easy to imagine barb's final moments too, being dragged into the upside down through the pool in his backyard.

but when he thinks of these things, there's no feeling behind them.

for months, nancy grieved barb, and just when steve thought she was starting to get better, get over that grief, halloween happened and she was back to square one.

max, for months, grieved billy. she grieved to the point of self sacrifice, to the point of writing everybody a letter in the event of her own death.

and now, dustin. he's a shell of the kid he used to be.

and something in steve must be broken. because he doesn't get it.

it's not that he's never lost anybody before. steve's earliest memory is his grandfather's funeral. he was maybe four or five. his mother had an arm around him as they sat side by side in the church pew, and something wet landed on his head. when he looked up, his mother was crying.

and steve couldn't figure out why.

when steve was thirteen, his favorite aunt died. he went to the funeral that time too. everyone was crying. everyone but steve. they'd all asked him 'are you okay?' and steve didn't know what to say. he was fine.

people die. it's a fact of life. people are born, they live, and then they die. it happens to everybody. sure, sometimes it's tragic, but it happens to everybody eventually.

what's the point of carrying something as debilitating as grief when death is inevitable?

maybe it makes him a selfish, uncaring asshole. maybe he's exactly what everybody's always said he is.

steve's always figured that when it's someone really important to him, he'll finally get it. but the goalpost of important enough keeps on getting pushed back. because eddie's dead, and max isn't out of the woods yet, and steve himself is still being monitored for the bat bites because, like owens said, no one knows the long term effects of the demobat venom.

steve could die, this time around.

and still. nothin'.

well, not nothing.

there's just discomfort where grief should be. all around him, people are crying. because they couldn't save eddie, they might not be able to save max, something may still happen to steve himself.

he's swimming in this sea of mourning, and steve is so uncomfortable. he doesn't know how to comfort anyone. he doesn't have the words for dustin, who's already lost one older brother figure just to find out he could lose another. he doesn't have the right words for robin, who fell into this whole thing at steve's side, who's had to watch him throw himself into deadly situations over and over again.

she's in a kind of pre-grieving state, because she knows that even if steve does make it through this and the upside down comes calling again, he's going to continue to throw himself in harm's way. and steve has no idea how to comfort her.

it's not that he's suicidal or anything. it's just... death comes for everybody eventually. and he knows that not dying matters more to the others than it does to him.

he's all kinds of doped up on good pain meds, and maybe that's what's numbing this whole situation, but... steve doesn't think so.

he thinks something in him must be broken.